Urgent: Grab Your Name URL on Facebook at midnight

StomperNet — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 23:19:26 +0000

This is IMPORTANT and you need to know about it RIGHT AWAY.

Tonight Facebook is staging one of the biggest virtual land grabs ever – the rush to claim your own name on Facebook.com.

You’ve heard of Internet Marketers claiming that the surge of traffic crashed their servers?

Well tonight there will be a server rush that has rarely, if ever, been duplicated on the Net. And you NEED to be part of it.

Right now if you want to send someone to your profile, you have to figure out a URL that looks something like this:

www.facebook.com/people/Your-Name/585946540
(That’s an inactive URL, BTW, so don’t click it.)

But wouldn’t you rather own www.facebook.com/yourname?

And this becomes even MORE important for Facebook Fan Pages (not your regular friend profiles, the pages you can set up to promote your business.) Can you imagine how devastating it would be to have someone else own your company name in Facebook?

In the past, it was easy to own your own name on Facebook, all you had to do was to spend a large amount with Facebook (think $50,000+ per month) or be a huge celebrity, and it was yours.

But starting tonight at midnight Eastern US time (that would be 9:00pm Pacific time) you can claim your name as a facebook URL. Plus, you can claim names for your business pages too.

But here’s the catch – it’s first come, first serve. Imagine a couple of hundred MILLION people all try to grab their name at the same time, and there will be some interesting server shenanigans occuring.

Here’s what to do.

Tonight at midnight US Eastern time, login to Facebook then go to http://www.facebook.com/username

You will see a form that will give you several suggested usernames, and the ability to choose your own. Either choose one of the names suggested or type in your own.

Repeat this process for any Facebook Fan Pages you administer, though there are three catches: first, your page must have over 1000 fans prior to May 31st 2009, you can’t claim something generic like travel or insurance, and you can’t claim someone else’s trademark.

In fact, if you have a registered trademark, I suggest you go to
http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=username_rights
right now to prevent others from grabbing your name.

If someone else has already has your name, get creative - add a period, or a dash, shorten it, lengthen it, or slap a number in there somewhere.

That’s the drill. I’ll be there at midnight, and I suggest you be there too.

And bring a book, the page refresh times may be really sllllloooooowwww.

Don Crowther
SMARTS Founder
StomperNet Faculty Member

Stompernet Blog

StomperNet LIVE 7: More from the floor

StomperNet — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 19:42:37 +0000

Hello again! We’re back posting once more from the StomperNet LIVE home base with another report – this time, I want to focus on Saturday’s first standout keynotes.

If you can’t nail down the quality of your event in the first hour of the day, it’s going to start off dragging and it won’t EVER pick back up.

But this is StomperNet. It NEVER drags over here.

So, let’s start at the beginning. On Saturday morning, we subjected our attendees to something very… loud.

Perry Belcher took the main stage, before most folks had even had enough coffee to get going. And let me tell you, he took hold, captured our attention and he didn’t let go until he’d delivered one of the most comprehensive strategies for quickly dominating any niche by practically manufacturing celebrity status using social networking.

Perry Belcher on the stage, laying down the foundation for social marketing domination

So why Perry? Why social media? Maybe because he got TENS of thousands of Twitter followers in less than 200 days. He’s maxed out on Facebook in the same amount of time. The results of Perry’s twitter linking is the same as instantly mailing a list of 30K+! And that’s INSTANT. That’s 100% deliverability. That’s control that anyone can replicate.

The BIG picture is all about linking together all your social activities, but “Step 1″ might surprise you. According to Perry, even though it’s a relative newcomer to the social site game, Twitter is the start of EVERY social campaign, simply because that’s where the fast responders are. Twitter users want new fresh info immediately, and they gain a kind of “social currency” by repeating that info.

Therefore, it’s the PERFECT place to try to gain fast followers, and begin to release your info.

Of course, there’s a LOT more to becoming a Twitter demi-god, which is why when Perry asked for more time, the audience told him he could take as long as he needed! Wow. The crowd has spoken.

Maybe they were just hypnoized by those crazy shirts of his. Here’s a better look, in case you didn’t see it loudly enough in the first picture.

Here's a better shot of Perry's shirt (batteries not included).

I honestly wish I’d had my camera at Saturday night’s cocktail hour, because the shirt he wore THEN was even MORE… enthusiastic. (Think flames and dollar signs!)

Now, Perry set the tone for the entire day, giving our attendees a great foundation to be able to discuss their ongoing business-building and marketing efforts with our faculty and their fellow entrepreneurs, business owners, colleagues, and peers.

And throughout the rest of the day, during our confidential roundtables and site reviews, the high energy level Perry set in the morning carried through WELL into the evening.

So how do we keep it going on Sunday? Even though we LOST an hour to daylight savings, things kept rolling like an avalanche coming down the mountain.

Stay tuned for an update a little later on!

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Urgent: Grab Your Name URL on Facebook at midnight

StomperNet LIVE 7: More from the floor