Claim Your Brand

A few days ago I was having a discussion with a friend about claiming your name on various social media platforms.  He thought I should delete my Pinterest account since I don’t use it.

I disagree.  I wrote last month about the importance of owning your domain name and I believe the same is worthy of consideration in the social media world.

For me, the name I claim is ScLoHo.

Why?

Scott Howard is too common a name and I wanted a unique identity to separate me from the other Scott Howards in this world.

The origin of ScLoHo can be found here: http://www.scotthoward.me/about/

If you don’t claim your brand, or name on social media platforms, then you could have someone else claim your name and create confusion as to who the real “Joe Smith” really is.

I’ve got two sites you can use to check for your name/brand:

Namechk is one that I used a few years ago: http://namechk.com/  but it appears to be missing some pretty important social media networks like Pinterest.

So, do a second check at KnowEm: http://knowem.com/   They’ll try and get you to buy premium services but I don’t recommend doing that.

By the way, I have done some weeding out of my social media accounts.  I killed my MySpace account this summer but I’m keeping Pinterest as a personal bookmarking site for my own use.