Social Media Usernames like Website Domain Names

I read this post on ProBlogger yesterday about Seth Godin’s Twitter account. In fact Seth doesn’t have a Twitter account, but there’s definitely someone who using Seth’s name on twitter, which is potentially bad for his considerable reputation.

Seth responded with a post of his own affirming he doesn’t use Twitter or actively use Facebook, explaining why.

First, I don’t want to use a tool unless I’m going to use it really well. Doing any of these things halfway is worse than not at all. People don’t want a mediocre interaction.

Second, I don’t want to add a layer of staff between me and the tools I use and the people I interact with.

And the fact you can’t use all the social media tools available to it’s full potential, not even the most popular ones, not if you want to keep your day job. There’s simply too much work involved in maintain it all.

That said though I think Seth should have at least registered his name on Twitter, just so that other people wouldn’t be able to register it and impersonate him, potentially damaging his reputation.

Granted he could just deny that he doesn’t have a Twitter account and that person on Twitter is not him, but people won’t bother checking with him personally, or on his blog, whether that his him on Twitter or not. They will just assume it’s him.

Seth says he doesn’t have a staff I doesn’t want to add a layer of staff between him and the tools he uses, but he could at least get someone to make sure something like this doesn’t happen. Can you say ORM Seth?

And finally, the point I wanted to make is that, social media user accounts seem to be becoming more like .com domain names. Ok, it’s not exactly the same, but in the respect that you should make sure to register your name on popular, or potentially popular, social media websites before someone else does and wants to charge you large sums of money to buy back your name.

Should we even bother? Go the path Seth has taken, or make sure we register our names on social media website, or hire some person or company to make sure this our identities and reputations are protected online?