The rapid growth in uptake and adoption of Twitter has been well documented of late, with the UK’s Telegraph.co.uk reporting a year on year increase of 974% in traffic to Twitter in the UK, according to the latest figures from Hitwise.
Once the domain of tech-enthusiasts and early adopters, Twitter has started to hit the mainstream, as evidenced by Jonathon Ross’s (@wossy) introduction of the service to the masses in an interview with Steven Fry (@stevenfry) on this week’s “Friday Night with Jonathon Ross” (BBC1) – Fry boasting a current following of 63,634.
So when Ross finally convinced comedian Russell Brand (@rustyrockets) to jump on the bandwagon on his radio show, its no surprise that with the push from live listenership, Brand could boast over 3000 followers within the hour (and 9000 within 24 hours). What was surprising though, was that no sooner had brand set up @rustyrockets, a member of the general public had set up @rustyrocket with the same profile picture and initial tweets. Furthermore, this profile has managed to siphon 731 followers from the real Russell Brand in under 24 hours.
Cyber-squatting you see is no longer limited to domain names. With the social networking revolution comes an ever increasing ability for impersonators to create havoc. Hopefully by now, you have cemented yourself www.yourname.com, whether you intend to use it or not – it’s a small price to pay for needing it at a later date. But have you considered the social world? What about Twitter? Flickr? MySpace? Linked In? or Del.icio.us?
Having these properties available to you, at least on the most popular of social sites could save you a lot of trouble in the long term, should someone wish to impersonate you – not to mention the effectiveness of having a consistent username across all. Thankfully, the arduous task of a manual check is not needed, thanks to tools like Username Check.
Maybe its time you considered protecting your social identity?
This article was kindly contibuted by Nathan McKean (Twitter:@nmkean)
Posted by Louisa 
Posted by Louisa 
Posted by Louisa 
Apologies for the lack of articles for the last month or so. I do have a good excuse though! In late October I welcomed my first child, Oliver.
One way to generate clicks
February 25, 2009Have you seen this campaign recently run by Last Minute Travel? Their World for $1 campaign allows people to book hotel accommodation for only $1 a night for 15 minutes a day. The catch is that they don’t tell you which 15 minutes so users have to keep checking back and then racing the clock!
Pretty clever and a fairly neat way to raise awareness and get people visiting the site. Apparently they had 955 registrations in the first 6 days and obviously their visits would have been quite significant.
Unfortunately this sale is no longer available but a good strategy to keep in mind…
Credit: I heard about this campaign from emitch.