We have to admit it. The old adage “practice what you preach” has hit very close to home. Everyone has heard about the cobbler’s children who do not have shoes because the cobbler is too busy making shoes for everyone else. Well, we at Higher Logic have been walking around barefoot for a long time. In our social strategy, we have always recommended not limiting your social network to just the private options; using the public social networks can extend your reach and enable you keep in touch with members and non-members in new, fun and unique ways.
Unfortunately, we missed some key opportunities within the public social networks and have been trying to get our own internal social strategy up to par. It first started with our Facebook Fan page. We established our Fan page in late 2009 and looked forward to claiming our page/url within the Facebook world. For those familiar with fan pages, once you get 25 fans you can apply for your proprietary Facebook domain name, i.e. www.facebook.com/higherlogic. However, when we applied for the name, we were told that the name was unavailable and that we would need to provide a trademark number to secure it. Ugh, OK, back burner that for the time being.
Next up: Twitter. We had always relied on employees tweeting for us, but quickly realized we needed a corporate Twitter account. Upon registering for Twitter, we found that the Twitter username “HigherLogic” was already taken. How could this be? Again? – We were Higher Logic and who was claiming our name? Needless to say, with two strikes against us, shoring up our social strategy was going to be quite a bit more difficult. So, after some legal paperwork submissions to the US Trade and Patent Office, we came armed with our trademark number and battle ready to fight for our public network identity!
We approached Twitter first and filled out the appropriate on-line forms under the “trademark infringement” section. After some back and forth, about 4 weeks later, the folks at Twitter granted the official username “HigherLogic”. Victory was ours! And, we can also share the same good news about Facebook. By applying and going through the correct Facebook channels, we were assigned the URL www.facebook.com/higherlogic.
There are so many lessons to be learned here. Certainly, when dealing in public domains, protecting your identity, intellectual property and copyright information is key. There will be new public social media vehicles introduced, and not all will be applicable, but by all means pay close attention to your on-line presence. Now that we have resolved our public network shortcomings, we are ready to rock and we are excited to show off Higher Logic’s shiny new shoes!
To follow us on Twitter or find us on Facebook: