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Brand Yourself/Your Business Not Facebook
So the big news this week is that Facebook plans on opening their version of a .com auction for names this Friday night. I can just imagine the call that went out from editors at CrunchAbleBeatReadInsiderGigaNet to their writers to cancel all plans and be ready for the launch and the potential for breakage. I am sure somewhere a designer is creating the Facebook version of a whale. I like Anil’s future look at how the night will go.
My take is (and has always been) that you should brand yourself and/or your business and never brand another company in an attempt to backdoor your brand. Whether it’s Twitter, MySpace, Yahoo Pages, Geocities, GoDaddy or now Facebook, you need to always do what you can to control the flow. Controlling the flow is very, very easy and here’s how it’s done. And the control I am talking about is from your customer’s perspective.
Buy a domain name and use that as your vehicle.
Does that mean you shouldn’t create a presence on Facebook or MySpace or wherever your customers are? Of course not. And I think it makes sense to grab your brand’s vanity URL if it is available. I agree with Marshall about as he says his domain name is better than any vanity URL will ever be. Chris Messina takes a more technical look at the vanity urls.
This afternoon I watched an interesting video from newly-launched social media consultant Gary Vaynerchuk who seems to think the complete opposite. Gary compares Facebook fan pages to Twitter accounts – he’s right that FB FP have more flexibility but he completely leaves out the concept about owning your brand. (side note, somehow he already ”owns” the facebook.com/gary url meaning you won’t be able to get it) The ultimate flexibility for a fan is to be able to find all of a brand’s social interactions.
What happens to the people who aren’t on Facebook or who don’t care to “friend” a brand. If you push to one property, you lose the opportunity to get with users on all of the other properties. I don’t care if all a brand has on their xyz.com/net/uk/de/eu site are links to all of their social network pages, it’s still a much better interaction than allowing your brand to be controlled by one social network. It does add one extra click but the overall value of that click is higher than the alternative.
I have a unique perspective – not just from being in this industry since the beginning and having worked on all sides – but because I process business cards for a living. It’s amazing to see how many brands don’t even have their own domain for email and are using an ISP’s email server. A large percentage of cards outside the tech space have no URL at all. Every business card must have a URL on it and that URL should point to your company or personal website – not one or more networks.
Think about offline social interactions as a transaction. By pointing to one URL it makes the transaction smooth and easy for the customer. You only have seconds to make the transaction – would you rather push the person to one social network or to a site that offers them to connect with you how they want to?
agree – always get a .com
As usual, great commentary Allen. I too am amazed at how many companies are embracing Facebook and relegating their branding to them. The biggest amazement to me is the recent trend of companies that display a Facebook url in their television commercials. I’ve seen this done by both VW and Vitamin Water this week.
I don’t get it. Perhaps they are doing this in a way to say “Hey, we’re hip” but I don’t think they realize the long term effects of that behavior. Perhaps it’s just a temporary test but I still find it very odd. Can you imagine if companies advertised a Geocities url back in the day? Blasphemy.
How very true, we should always BRAND ourselfs and our Business, I agree with thomas power.
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I agree with the post. We have no control with twitter.com/my_brand. They can even kick us out anytime. It is lot harder to lose .com domain. That is why buying a franchise is more like buying a job not a business. Have a dream, create a brand, take action, and change the world. Also ADD approach [like Microsoft, msn to live to bing ] to brand does not work.
Subhankar Ray
AAfter Search
I completely agree with your statement that professionals need to have a destination URL that is branded across other mediums (business cards, e-mails, etc)
Years ago I was in the “first round” of domain sellers who focused on personal names in the domain space. Personally I’ve always been very fond of .COM as the primary focus, as too many folk are trained to expect .com extensions.
I don’t think it is a valid tactic to use Facebook as a destination. If you are looking at having a healthy online presence you need to have profiles on the major networks, but tactically you should focus them all to the site/presence that you control/own 100%
In regards to Facebook (or Linkedin/Twitter/Myspace/etc) you have NO IDEA what the terms of service are going to look like in six months or six years. Imagine having everyone you know looking at your Facebook profile in twelve months and having all the wonderful advertising x10.
If anyone is really interested in the name and online reputation space, I’m working on a private beta of a project at http://buzzprofile.com or folk can follow us at http://twitter.com/buzzprofile
Thanks for the good commentary everyone.
~Barry Hurd
best solution of all:
buy your domain name, then set up URL redirects from subdirectories:
mydomain.com/facebook
mydomain.com/myspace
etc…
then redirect them to your annoying long network URLs!
this also saves you if you want to change your network accounts later.
i recently posted this tip on my blog, with cut-paste code and instructions:
http://www.zariat.com/z/2009/05/17/diy-link-shortening-for-your-networks/
Actually, the post is not saying much that’s not common sense. I love zariat’s tips though.
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I agree with Mark Krynsky about how it’s a little odd how companies advertise their facebook url’s in their TV commercials, and how in a way it is similar to advertising a page that you could setup on a geocities or some other free webpage service, that displays ads and other linked content that may be completely different from what you’re selling. It seems a little distracting and you end up sending a mixed message about who you are, and what you do.