Great free tool for researching username availability

I’ve set a fair few businesses and brands up over the years and the art of choosing a name has become more and more challenging. Back in the day it was simply a case of checking you weren’t infringing a trademark or using the same name as someone else in the local/national scene.

But with the expansion of the internet, mass numbers of new businesses as well as cyber squatting, you now need the all important www.brandname.com as well as your local country (.co.uk) variant plus of course a suitable user name on all the key social networks.

I learnt to my cost the importance of buying up a cybersquatted url as early in the process as possible. When I founded Musicademy some 13 years ago the misspelling www.musicacademy.com was available for a couple of thousand dollars. Foolishly I ignored it – we were bootstrapping and had precious little cash to spare. It became obvious, however, as time went on that our customers were indeed frequently misspelling our brand name and ending up on the cyber squatter site. The legal owner had cashed in and was milking the visitors with various ads. And it was costing us business as well as reputation. The price (not surprisingly as we had inadvertently been sending thousands of people their way) was now on the market for ten times the original price. We negotiated, but it was still an expensive mistake.

Social media

Then as if it’s not complicated enough choosing a brand name and securing the url, you also need to nab your space in all the relevant social networks. They are surprisingly busy places with many of the options you’d have selected already taken. Whilst Twitter will release a cyber squatted @name to the rightful trademark owner (you simply complete a form), it’s not that straightforward on the other platforms. We’d had particular issues with Facebook ourselves who have allowed a private profile the /digiterati vanity name and also refused us the /thedigiterati despite no one else using it. We therefore opted for www.facebook.com/teamdigiterati but it’s definitely sub optimal when our www url and our Twitter and YouTube user names share the same convention.

Help is at hand with this great tool from Knowem

To save you going to each individual social media platform you simply go to www.knowem.com  and pop your name of choice into the check box. It will search the USPTO Trademark Database (that’s the American trademark system) as well as website domains and over 500 social networks.