Easy Research For Bad Guys To Hijack Reputations

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SEOs know the risk. It’s easy for determined malevolent-users to destroy reputations using social media. The ability of a provocateur to mess with a  brand’s reputation by social media profile, used to involve a fairly labor intensive research process. No longer…Now a quick scan is available for free 🙂 .

CheckUserNames.com is a new tool from @streko, @graywolf and @itcn which quickly streamlines the search process for determining which social profiles are available for any keyword. Play around with underscores and dashes as they yield different results in various sites. After determining whether a profile is a available, there is a link to easily procure the profile.

We’ve always counseled clients to procure their brand names in various social news, sharing and other sites like Digg, YouTube, Flickr and StumbleUpon. Now it’s extremely easy for anyone to do a quick scan and grab the profiles.

Lawyers, Guns and Money
The fact that brands with trademarks will probably be able to reclaim hijacked avatars by legal process is not a comfort. We’ve got a big brand client working to gain control of a parked Twitter profile on their trademarked name. Even when our client wins, it will have been be an expensive and distracting process.

Run (don’t walk) to procure profiles on the CheckUserNames list, that have a tendency to have their profiles indexed. Be careful about your name.

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