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(Read time = 2 minutes ) So last Thursday after an Agency review session, the Client lead tossed out an interesting dilemma. Seems they’d been debating internally for several month about the “social media” thing and were being stumped because someone else had registered their company name on Twitter and several other main new media sites. The angst had tangled the team into a state of in action.
The client wanted the Agency to begin a brainstorm on alternative names and spin up a proposal. Cool – new business!
Good news is that when we started our due diligence and client input sessions, we quickly uncovered that unbeknownst to Client management, two years earlier, a software developer had the brilliant foresight to create a Twitter account (and associated other site registrations) for the company (he figured he should grab it before anyone else did) but then failed to tell anyone up the chain because no one at the time was much interested in the social media game.
The problem: The beloved engineer didn’t tell anyone and the company leadership team didn’t have a plan or a strategy to monitor their brand online. As a result, customers, partners and yes competitors had been “following” the Twitter feed even though the company did not know and no one was tweeting.
It gets worse. Being a technically savvy geek, the employee has over 74 random emails and could not recall which email he used to register the account. The company could not leverage their own brand w/out a direct and lengthy appeal Twitter process. The CEO had to prove the company owned the trademark and he was in fact the CEO and therefore authorized to make the request.
Happy ending: Twitter reset the account for the company’s CEO. The Agency got the assignment to craft a social media strategy rather than brainstorming a brand workaround.
Lesson learned: Just because you don’t have a strategy for the “Next new thing” does not mean that your brand will not be out there living, growing and evolving. It just means you are not aware and certainly not in control. When it comes to the wild wild web, ignorance is not bliss.
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B2B Marketing Savvy: ScoopDog's Blog 
07/22/2009 at 4:48 am
That was hilarious. It was a great idea of the employee to grab the names, but to not tell anyone was a massive failure. We have pretty much all the names for our business on social networks at the moment. It’s good to get in there and grab them when you can because you don’t want someone mis-representing you.
07/22/2009 at 6:30 am
At least he took action. Too many companies are paralyzed trying to figure out “this social media thing” and for that reason maybe they shouldn’t be
on it. The nature of these new media is “dive in and
participate” not “sit around and worry about it.”