Preview of Concentrated Lime – our newsletter.

There’s a party going on somewhere – reserve your seat now.

We’re lucky. We’re still some of the first to the party. OK the sofas have all been taken but there are still lots of window seats available. The future of marketing is online, there isn’t a lot of debate about this anymore – it’s just a question of timescale and which bits of online are going to become most important. I can’t give you all the answers to this one but I can tell you how to claim your seat at the digital party.

Right get online and claim your username(s) – there are a lot of services out there that require a username by which you will be known both to the service and often to other users.

For example facebook recently opened up its URL structure so you can now have a nice easy to remember username instead of a load of random numbers. Such as: http://www.facebook.com/simoncmason, LinkedIn do much the same thing: http://www.linkedin.com/in/simoncmason.

My guess is that in five years you will printing at least some of these addresses on your business card (if you’re not already doing so). It will look a lot better if you get out and claim the best ones you can now, both for yourself and your business. I recommend choosing a username that you can use accross as many services as possible so it is easy for your contacts to find you.

Fortunately there is a very easy way of doing this. Go to – http://namechk.com and try out a few usernames that you like – go for the one that you can use across all or most of these services.

Now for starters I would sign up with the following sites:
www.facebook.com (Sign up and then go to www.facebook.com/username to get yours)
www.linkedin.com (Sign up and then choose your username in your public profile section)
www.twitter.com (Choose your username when you sign up)
www.flickr.com (Choose your username when you sign up)
www.posterous.com (Send an e-mail to post@posterous they will send you one back with a link to change your userdetails)
www.ebay.com (If you want to sell on ebay it makes sense to get the same username)

There are lots of other sites as you will see from namechkr – sign up to any you feel could be relevant to your business now or in the future. It may also be worth doing a domain name search to see if you can get www.yourusername.com – you can do this here: www.1and1.co.uk

Oh and once you’ve done this go to http://wave.google.com and click on the big blue “Let me know when it’s ready” button – as soon as it is ready you will be able to sign up and claim your username (google wave looks likely to be huge so it’ll be nice to be you and not you1326412!)

Now you have a nice consistent username which is easy to remember for you and your contacts making it easier for them to find you online – not bad for a few minutes work.

Hope you find this useful – if so why not sign up to our e-mail? We’ll send you nothing but helpful tips and insights into the changing world of marketing.