There have been numerous examples of digital identity fraud in recent months e.g. Phil Spector was allegedly Tweeting from his jail cell; Tony La Russa, manager of baseball’s St. Louis Cardinals, successfully sued Twitter for an unauthorized page using his name damaged his reputation; Kanye West wrote an amusingly irate blog entry about being misrepresented on Twitter.

Brandjacking is prevalent in social media because it’s easy to set up accounts and find an audience. Couple this with the social media boom and downturn in the economy and people have both the resources and the increased motivation to participate in such practices. The sheer reach of online marketing is enough of a lure. Last year’s BrandJacking Index from MarkMonitor.com illustrated that not only is cybersquatting continuing to dominate methods used by online fraudsters but it also rose by 18% over the year with the outlook for 2009 being even worse.

You can read the report in full here.

So what can an online marketer do about brandjacking?

1) Run an online audit of your brand :: Use a site such as knowem.com to see if your username is taken across a multitude of sites, who by and what they are using it for. If you have only one brand which is also your company name then this should be a fairly simple task – if you have a multitude of brands then it may be a bit more lengthy.

2) Prioritize your Username :: Think about your clients – what do they call you? What would they search for if they were looking for you on their social network? Then grab that username – If your brand has already been registered then look at who has it and what they are doing with it. All of the major social networks such as Myspace, Facebook and more recently Twitter have a good track record at returning banded domains to their rightful owners, so don’t be afraid to contact them if your brand is being misrepresented.

3) Prioritize Your Network Selection :: Although it is a good thing to have brand presence on each social network, especially to hinder brandjackers, having an incomplete or unused profile on an active comunity can be almost as detrimental as having a fake one or none at all. Using a tool such as Quantcast can help you find the most relevant sites for you based on user demographics. Whatever you do ALWAYS leave a link back to your homepage on every profile you create. This will not only help visitors who find you get to your main site, but will also help with search engine rankings by providing high page rank backlinks to your site.

4) Stalk Your Competitors :: Choose a few competitors who’s success you want to emulate and find out where their online presence is. What sites are they active on? What sort of content are they posting? Then consider weather or not it’s worth you joining them on that community if you aren’t already a member.

5) Don’t Overthink It :: It may seem an obvious thing to say, but social media and social networks are first and foremost – Social. If what you’re saying isn’t interesting or useful to the end user/’follower’/'buddy’ then you will simply be ignored/unfollowed.

Finally a little note about the power of social networks – @StephenFry may be able to drive 1000′s visitors to a site just by sending a tweet out, but that’s because he’s Stephen Fry – Don’t base your whole marketing strategy around setting up a Twitter profile and sending out one tweet. Social networking is just another string to the online marketing bow – not a substitute.

If you would like your own Facebook vanity url you will need to log on for 12.01.a.m EDT Saturday 13th June where you will be able to choose your url on a first come, first serve basis.  For companies that use social networks as part of their ongoing SEO campaign this is great news.

Some points to bear in mind if you are looking to secure your vanity url you will need to visit facebook.com/username where you will be given instructions on how to choose your own url which can only include numbers, letters and periods.  Once you have chosen your url you can’t change it so be careful with your choice.  Please bear in mind that their will be a rush on companies who want to secure their urls for branding and SEO.

One thing to consider for fan pages is that you must have at least 1,000 fans and created the account before 31st May 2009.

Sites such as Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn already offer vanity urls and it clearly offers a benefit to their brand and for people that search for that brand with that network will come across the official presence.

If you have a popular name be wary as it has been leaked that certain people, companies and employees may be getting first dibs on their selection.