I remember back in the early days of the web, it was truly amazing. I also remember many discussions that not ALL businesses needed to be on the web. It was true, not all of them needed to be on the web at that point in time – it wasn’t mature enough. That has changed considerably, but I wonder if it has yet matured enough to quantify businesses being on the web.
That brings me to social media. Does YOUR Business NEED social media? Chances are, with the infancy of this new paradigm, you may not. You may not need to be interacting on every social network, such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIN and others. There may not be much that you can accomplish right now. Besides, launching a complete social media plan and then executing it is not easy, just read Chris Brogan’s thoughts on the subject.
However, there are two things that you should do, right now.
- Protect Your Brand/Business/Name: Simple enough – go out and register your brands, your business name and your trademarks on the various social tools so that some unscrupulous would-be wanna-be doesn’t do it for the sheer fact you haven’t yet. This also keeps the said wanna-be from causing damages by impersonating you, your business or your brand. Even if you don’t use these accounts right now, just like a domain name, protect who you are.
- Social Search Your Brand/Business/Name: This one can’t be said enough. If you are not actively searching through Google, Google Blog Search, Twitter Search, on Facebook, MySpace and the other plethora of social networks and social media tools, you are causing damage to your business, your brand and your name. You will have no idea that your product was a trending topic on Twitter, and that 95% of what is being Tweeted is NOT in your favor. Cleaning up this fall out is messy at best, and disastrous with long-term, if not permanent, damage.
There you have it, protect your business, your brand, your name and become proactive. If you should happen to notice chatter in the socialsphere, you have the accounts already in place, with which you can respond.
What if some damaging comments are made, and you find out that some 17-year old registered your preferred name, your brand name or business name and you now have to be ambiguous on your identity until you get that resolved?
What if that 17-year old (or 33 year old) who impersonated you responded to the chatter?

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