nick roshon's thoughts about digital advertising, seo, and social media

This is the funniest video I’ve seen in a while, so I’m reposting it. Follow Jake & Amir on Twitter for more humor, and I also highly recommend the Silicon Alley Insider for daily reading if you are in tech/advertising.

Without further adieu:

Courtesy of:  http://www.businessinsider.com/college-humor-explains-branded-content-clip-2009-5

My favorite part: “Branded content. Webisode. Mobisode. Hybrid. Multiplatform. Hyper-distribution. Integrated. Organic. Social. Viral. Community. CPM. Efficiency. Organic. Beacon. Embeddable. Dina Kaplan. Widget.”

I need to memorize that.

Here’s what you need to know about the new Facebook Usernames:

Go to http://www.facebook.com/username and reserve your username right now!. Your username will then become the subfolder on facebook.com where your page is stored. For instance, my username is “nickroshon” and my new URL is http://www.facebook.com/nickroshon

Hurry up and grab something if you haven’t already, but here are a few tips on picking your custom Facebook vanity URL:

- The dot doesn’t matter: if you choose nick.roshon or nickroshon, it still goes to the same place. Much like Gmail, Facebook will ignore the period between words and treat the two as the same. You can go to http://www.facebook.com/nickroshon and http://www.facebook.com/nick.roshon and they both take you to the same place, so in essence I got 2 vanity URLs from Facebook today.

- Facebook pages are different: If you are a page, and not just a personal user, you can only reserve your username/vanity URL if you created your fan page by May 31, 2009 and have at least 1,000 followers. The rest of you will get your shot in July.

- Get a Unique Username: If you want http://www.facebook.com/awesome, it’s still available. However, http://www.facebook.com/nick is already taken and so is http://www.facebook.com/likeaboss

- Don’t pick something stupid: It is permanent, and at the time of writing Facebook offers no method of changing your username / vanity URL, so you’re stuck with whatever you chose. So in 10 years, when no one has any clue what “likeaboss” really means, you’ll feel like an idiot.

- Avoid Trademarks: If you pick a brand name or trademarked term as your username/vanity URL, the owner of that trademark can appeal it on Facebook and you will be stripped of it, so don’t go out there grabbing something you know you don’t deserve.

- Username Squatting: If you want to create a bunch of dummy accounts to reserve other user accounts, you are too late. Right now, the ability to reserve a username is only available to Facebook profiles created before June 9, 2009, as I’m told by @ledet. That means I can’t go and create a second Facebook profile to grab http://www.facebook.com/nicholasroshon

-301 Redirect: Your old URL, i.e. http://www.facebook.com/people/Nick-Roshon/2401203 will now automatically redirect to your new URL. It is a 301 permanent redirect as I confirmed via Web Sniffer, which is what you want in order to pass along the link juice correctly.

Leave me comments with your thoughts, questions, comments, concerns, and snide remarks!

When you google your name what happens?   If you’re lucky enough to have a relatively uncommon name, your facebook, linkedin, or twitter accounts are likely to come up on the first page assuming you are using your real name.  These sites all have a lot of authority on google and are useful to searchers looking to find out more about you – this makes sense.

With that in mind, there are other slightly less popular social networking sites that you should register with to protect your name – even if you don’t plan on using them.  It’s free to register and could prevent you a major headache down the road.

Click here to check your social networking username availablity

I didn’t sign up for EVERY one, but I grabbed a few of the bigger ones anyway, and it actually kind of got me hooked on Flickr.  Speaking of, check me out on Flickr and add me as a contact!

Funny though, that site seems to be missing AIM and Gmail (but does include Yahoo!) but by now I’m guessing you’ve already checked those.

Anyway, just a friendly tip for anyone that is creating a blog in order to promote themselves, protect their online identity, or even bury a negative story off of the first page of Google by building new content to replace it, go grab your social networking sites now before its too late.