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