Lotame

Listen up brand managers, have you have been trying to get your organization to expirement social media? Have your efforts been unsuccessful? Well it’s time to reverse the conversation, and explain to your organization that you need to defend your brand and marks within the social media world. If you don’t grab your brand name on the various social media services out there, someone else will, and effectively Hijack your efforts. And the people who register your brand may (read: definitely will) say things that could damage your organization. I implore you, for the next 48 hours, take some time out of your busy day and register your brands and trademarks on the various different services. Hats off to our excellent PR firm Perkett (and their Blog), a my behest they put a list of the top 30 social media sites that you need to register your brands on.

Don’t wait or you may find that someone else has already taken them.

Top Tier – Set up profiles, actively monitor for relevant content, drive traffic from your blog, etc.:
Del.icio.us
Facebook
Flickr
FriendFeed
LinkedIn
SlideShare
StumbleUpon
Twitter
Technorati (“claim” your blog at minimum)
YouTube (along with other video distribution platforms: Vimeo, Viddler, Revver, Yahoo video, etc.)
DocStoc
Scribd

Second Tier – Set up branded profiles and use as warranted:
Digg
Windows Live spaces
Yahoo Groups
Google Groups

Third Tier — Claim your name and monitor:
Bebo
Brightkite (individual focus)
Friendster (international focus, Asia)
Gather
Identi.ca (alternative to Twitter)
Imeem
Ma.gnolia
Meetup
Multiply
MySpace (more for usage policy than an active corporate presence)
New York Times (TimesPeople)
Ning
Orkut (international focus, Brazil)
Picasa (alternative to Flickr, smaller community)
Plurk (alternative to Twitter, younger demographic)
Spoke
Tribe.net

If you think that there are other social media platforms that brands need to register on, please add a comment to this post or email me at scott@lotame.com

Consider this (courtesy of Wikipedia):

• September 18, 1851 - The New York Times was founded (although originally named New-York Daily Times). Newspaper.
• 1995 - The Times has a strong web presence and is ranked one of the top sites. The content is generated by the Times staff.
• March, 2005 - The New York Times Website has 555 Million page views. Content is still generated by Times staff.
• 2008 - The domain nytimes.com attracts at least 146 million visitors annually according to a Compete.com study. The Times website ranks 59th by number of unique visitors, with over 14 million unique visitors in August 2008. 
• June, 2008 - New York Times launches a Beta version of TimesPeople allowing users to connect, share, comment, and review items and content within the NYT site. A social network within the content driven site.

From TimesPeople:

"TimesPeople is a new way to discover what other readers find
interesting on NYTimes.com — and to make recommendations of your own.
With TimesPeople, you can share articles, videos, slideshows, blog
posts, reader comments, and ratings and reviews of movies, restaurants
and hotels."

When we say "social media", we should really be saying the "social internet". The internet as a whole is beginning to harness the power of profiles, user generated content, and the social graph. Websites that have traditionally been known for publishing content, are now realizing the importance of social interactions and engagement.

The consumers are the content creators. The creators are the consumers. And now, organizations that have built hugely successful businesses with content creation as its core competency, are adapting to the ever increasing demand for social interactions and collective, community based content creation/sharing.

In The Power of Profiles post by Fred Wilson:

While I am sure the people who work at the New York Times think of
themselves as a content company first and foremost, what goes on at the
New York TImes website is as much about software as it is about
content. And slowly but surely the Times online is becoming social
software. That’s a big deal.

The internet is growing up. We are all adopting and evolving with the changing times. Please welcome The New York Times to Social Media and the Social Internet.