360DigitalInfluence

There is lots of excitement about the step Facebook is taking to let folks establish a vanity url starting tomorrow at 12:01am. Facebook parties are launching everywhere to create a social event around grabbing urls at midnight. We asked Facebook whether brands should worry about losing their vanity urls to crafty squatters juiced up on Redbull tonight.

The short story is don’t worry…too much. You should be prepared to approach the urls like, well, regular urls. That means that you may have to explore all of the different ways your brand name may appear beyond the single rights protected way it is normally written. You have almost no chance losing facebook.com/yourbrand. But you need to consider whether you grab adjacent real estate to avoid encroachers ( facebook.com/your.brand; facebook.com/yrbrand; etc…). Update: keep in mind that you can only have one url per page. Update 2: From our good buddy Julio at GSI: facebook doesn’t distinguish between yourname and your.name - you get one, you got both.

Here is the scoop straight from Facebook:

“…More information can be found here:
 
FAQ: http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=900
Blog Post: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=90316352130

Starting Saturday, you can go into the system and choose your own names for both Pages & Profiles via this link: http://www.facebook.com/username/

If you find that the user name has already been taken and you hold the copyright, you can report infringement here: http://www.facebook.com/copyright.php?noncopyright_notice=1

If you/your client holds the rights to a name and wants to protect it from being taken by another user or business, you can enter the trademarked name and information here: http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=username_rights “

Don’t worry. But still throw a party tonight and grab some gold! (Just don’t aggravate the problem of squatters)