Remember the cyber-squatters who rose to notoriety in the 1990's? These were the enterprising folks who rushed out and bought up every major brand name + .com domain they could before the major brands figured out what the heck a dot com was.
Well guess, what. It's happening again.
Only it's not dot com domains. It's Twitter addresses. And because the addresses are free (unlike dot com domains which back in the day could cost $25 or more to reserve for a year), squatters are reserving addresses as fast as they can type words out of the English dictionary.
One blogger reports that all of the basic words in the English language have already been gobbled up by squatters.
If you work in an ad agency let me ask you a question. Have you reserved the Twitter addresses for your clients? Or at least recommended that they reserve their Twitter addresses? And have you gotten your own Twitter address?
Granted, if your client has a major brand name like Coca-Cola, you'll have a case with Twitter for getting the Twitter address handed over to you. It still will be a bit of a headache.
But otherwise, it could be a major headache, especially if your client has lost out to a business with the same name.
Also, consider getting Twitter addresses in the name of your client's CEO and anyone else who may be the brand's chosen micro-blogger.
Oh, and while you're at it, I suggest you go ahead and get your 12seconds and Zannel addresses as they will offer video micro-blogging capabilities.
This could be a great way to start a dialogue with your client about micro-blogging on Twitter and other social media tactics.
If you work in an ad agency and have yet to figure out how Twitter can help your client's brand, then keep coming back to this blog as I'll begin to share with you more about how Twitter is changing marketing with micro-blogging.
Right now, I'm going to get to work finding cool Twitter addresses I can squat on.
By the way, my Twitter address is @macwriter (I chose that rather than my own name as 1. Someone did beat me to my name and 2. macwriter is my screen name on most of my online accounts).
Kevin McIntosh is a freelance copywriter in the Nashville market. His work can be seen at www.KevinMcIntosh.com
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