We all know what a registered trademark® is by now. U.S. Federal trademark law (aka the Lanham Act) protects you from infringement of your registered product or service trade name. But what about all of this social media stuff?

Sure you just go get your Facebook Page, Twitter username, and LinkedIn Company Profile and you've gone a long way. As for anyone thinking of using Ferrari as part of their business name, trademark laws will stop you in the U.S. They will also stop you abroad through a treaty called the Madrid Protocol (even the Republic of Sudan just signed up for that agreement).

If it’s a cybersquatter that is taking your company’s registered trade name, then the international arbitration system created by the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is for you. Just follow their procedures. You have a pretty strong enforcement ability there too since that’s where the magic of domain registration resides and they will transfer a domain name to where it belongs.

So you’re covered right? You guessed it, “Wrong!”

Depending on your point of view, you may not think this is enough. Let me help your point of view. There are at least 340 social network sites! Let me help some more. Some are big, some are small. ICANN rules regarding your domain name aren’t going to apply. Trademark laws in the US? Good luck. Madrid Protocol? Same.

We’re talking about anyone anywhere in the world that can go to any of these social media websites and register your business name, intentionally or not, and leave you wondering who it was with only some obscure customer service contact form of the social media site itself to try to get some relief.

So do at least this now:

1. Get your name and products set up on the big 3 (or 4 or 5…), Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn etc.
2. Decide which others you should get now like YouTube.
3. Research social media sites in your industry and get those (if you’re a photographer go to Flickr now for example).
4. Use a service like knowem.com to at least search and (possibly register) on multiple social networking sites for a fee (I have not used their service to register as yet but I have searched our own trade names).

This is just practical advice really because there does not seem to be any law or procedure that directly applies. An ICANN type procedure that applied to social networks would be a good start.

The wild west of racing to register domain names may soon pale in comparison to the social media network phenomenon. Even with a trademark, social medial sites are so pervasive that you will simply have to claim your most important “real estate” on the Internet before someone else does.