Coach Deb, in The Twitter Handbook blog, wrote a post entitled “Protect Yourself from Twitter Squatters” and invitation to a conference call about the topic. In the post, Deborah referred to another online article at Business Day, entitled “Squatters Causing Confusion on Twitter” which discusses the appearance of name grabbing on Twitter to get control of certain IDs, some of which may be protected by copyrights and other regulation.
Where the names aren’t protected, there are some thoughts about the potential for the twitter relationship to become a fun marketing exchange OR a marketing nightmare that has been compared to stalking. Pretty soon, we may have a social media service that amounts to Twitter cops.
One point that makes this situation different than the domain grabs of the early Internet days is the anonymous nature of Twitter accounts. Who just grabbed your name? Why? What would you want to do about it? Where were you when making your own choices? Clearly, some have not taken the power of Twitter seriously enough to cover all our bases. Sometimes that won’t matter; in other situations, it sure could. Twitter, to big business, in its pain of today’s economy, still seems like silliness. It just doesn’t seem desirable to have someone on staff reading ‘drivel’ and participating in the sweep of notes and comments. YET, big companies such as Walmart, Target and Coca-Cola are getting the picture and going for it.
Branding has become valuable activity on Twitter and Facebook with retail marketing learning swiftly from Internet marketing. As members of VAnetworking.com network, virtual assistants can relate to the value of @Vanetworking.com . That is a bugle call to all of us in our digests of tweets and posts during the day.
So, enough with the Twitter stalkers and Twitter Squatters; have we thought about the repetitive thinking in our society that actually MANY of us have identical names? How weird is that? I’ve found people with identical names for nearly every person in my family. I’ve known people who were find, professional people who shared a name with sleazy criminals; this turned up in security checks! Now and then, I search for YOU on Facebook or Twitter. I am amazed at how many of YOU there are. YOU turn up in every corner of the world. If you don’t add a recognizable avatar or an informative profile, I can’t tell you apart!
If nothing else ever comes from the social media activity, we are all more and more aware of the sheer numbers of people in the world who are insecure about their place in time and want to tweet, post, sing and generally make sure SOMEONE knows we are here. I wonder what the aliens are thinking of this? Do you suppose ET tweets? Or reads Tweets?
Read more over on @ Bar JD Virtual Professionals on BarJD.com
