In mid June Facebook opened up personalized URLs for individuals profile pages and for fan pages with more than 1000 fans. At the end of June, they allowed organizations that had just 100 fans to get their personalized URLs. The benefit to having a personalized URL on Facebook is so that you can further brand yourself and/or your organization and more easily connect with or be found by your friends and donors using a memorable web address.
So here’s the kicker: we got our Facebook personalized URL when when the page wasn’t published and we had only 3 fans!
But wait, you know that the Facebook fan page requirements are a minimum of 100 fans? And you cannot get fans if your page isn’t published. So…how’d we do it? Well for starters, we own the trademark to our name.
When the username land grab was first announced, Facebook provided a way for us users to submit proof that we owned the trademark of our company name. Oneicity immediately filled out the form. And after Facebook’s review of our documentation, they forwarded their approval to us on July 1st! And ta da! We got the username we wanted without ever publishing our page! We have since published our page and as of this writing, we have 12 fans. At the bottom of this post you can see our Oneicity fan page live! You can actually see what’s going happening on our fan page live! Amazing technology, isn’t it?
We were all excited to tell you that you could do the same, but now it appears that Facebook is not offering a proactive trademark name request. Rather now you submit to them LegalZoom.com. Obviously all sorts of the usual legal disclaimers go here–“buyer beware” “you get what you pay for” “warning high voltage” etc. But if you’re willing to do a little work on your own and talk to the nice people at the US Patent and Trademark Office if necessary then you can do it for a relatively small investment.
Many of our friends have had to work really hard to get 100 fans to get their profile vanity name. We’re fortunate to have leveraged the power of trademarking to get our page name. And we’d love it if you’d become our fan to support creative strategies like this. You’ll want to see the other cool things we do that you can’t see anywhere else but Facebook.
So…how about you? What’s your experience with trademarks? Do you have a fan page on Facebook? Do you have a personalized URL? We’d love to hear from you!
Hoots and Thomas
