New Facebook usernames: Protect your brands
As of the 13th of June Facebook will allow users to customise their profiles URL in the format of www.facebook.com/username/. According to Facebook this is designed to make it easier for friends, family, co-workers, and even search engines to find profiles without extraneous scouring of the site.
Putting the user’s handle on the URL isn’t a new concept for social networking sites as Twitter and MySpace and many others already permit this. However the increase commercialisation of Facebook by companies does raise an important branding question, are our clients names protected? Twitter and a number of other sites have been severely hit by impostors pretending to be people or companies they are not. Internet domain names also have a long history of people speculatively purchasing company names for financial gain or malicious intent.
In an attempt to counter this Facebook has put in place several safety measures:
- There is a web page for companies to register their trademark with Facebook to prevent it being hijacked at launch. I would suggest that we recommend to all our clients that they use this form to protect their name.
- Once a user has registered a username to use they can not change or transfer. This is an attempt to stop people speculatively purchasing names and then trying to sell them.
- Since the 31st of May anyone signing up for a Facebook account will not be able to register a username straight away but will have a cooling off period, again to prevent speculative registrations.
Even if a client does not have a Facebook profile or group it is worthwhile ensuring they protect themselves against impersonation and ensure they retain control of their brand names.
To pre-register a trademarked brand name use the following form:
http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=username_rights
