Sarah Dobbs looks at the Twitter users who share their names with massive brands
Every Christmas, @JohnLewis receives a barrage of tweets about the store’s newest Christmas advert. The problem is, @JohnLewis isn’t a shop. He’s a man called John Lewis who lives in Virginia and works as a computer science teacher. The actual Twitter handle for the department store is @johnlewisretail, which is admittedly less obvious than @johnLewis, but, well, John Lewis got there first, and since it’s his actual name, he’s well within his rights to hang onto it.
Even if that means endlessly replying to people who want to complain about his café or complement his lingerie selection. Which he does, all year round. He’s good at snappy responses, usually making a silly joke by replying as if they’re actually talking to him before dropping in the handle for the store in a way that gently points out their mistake.
This sense of humour has seen his follower count swell to a respectable 15,900 over the last couple of years, but though people tweet at him all the time, he must have to brace himself every November for a fresh onslaught of advert related tweets.
Though John Lewis is the most wellknown example of mistaken Twitter identity, there are quite a few others who have similarly confusing handles – people who share names with politicians, or sportspeople, or brands, and who probably never imagined they’d be fielding so many misdirected tweets when they first signed up for the microblogging service.
So what can you do when your Twitter handle causes so much confusion? Well, there are a couple of different options…
Hand It Over
If your Twitter mentions were getting flooded by tweets directed at someone else, making Twitter basically unusable to you, you might consider just changing your handle. Twitter users tend to be pretty lazy when it comes to tagging people in tweets, particularly the disgruntled ones, and seeing your Notifications tab light up because people are angry about customer service is no fun.
The Twitter username @BMW, for example, used to be owned by tech reporter Brian M. Westbrook. As an early adopter, the username made sense – it’s short, which is good for a medium where characters are strictly limited, and it’s also memorable. What’s more, you know... those are his actual initials. He ended up getting a lot of tweets from people who thought the handle belonged to the car brand, of course, and while he was still replying jokily to them in 2012, he’s since changed his username to @BrianWestcott.
Similarly, @AMD used to belong to Adam M. Doppelt, a tech entrepreneur who, like Westbrook, signed up early and nabbed his initials as a username. If you’re reading this magazine, you can probably see the problem: Advanced Micro Devices, AMD, wanted the account for themselves. Their marketing department got in touch, asking Doppelt to change his handle so they could use it themselves, but he was initially reluctant – after all, it is his name.
After a bit of negotiating, though, he agreed to free up the name for AMD the brand when they agreed to pay $50,000 to local charities (which is nice). He now goes by @adamdoppelt.
Try To Sell It
Doppelt’s deal might seem like a reasonable response to owning a Twitter username that other people want – after all, plenty of people got payouts by buying up brand-relevant URLs and convincing the real brands to pay them to release them, and now that Twitter accounts are as important as websites were in the early 2000s, you’d think there’d be money to be made there.
Certainly some people have tried to either buy or sell desirable Twitter handles. Former pro-skateboard Rob Dyrdek, for example, has tried in the past to buy @rob from its current owner, Rob Bertholf. Unfortunately for him, Bertholf is in marketing, and understands too much about search engine optimisation to be willing to part with it. Naoki Hiroshima, who owns @N, has also said he’s been offered $50,000 to sell his handle, but he too turned it down.
Undoubtedly some people have successfully exchanged money for Twitter cred, but before you go registering hundreds of celeb-like Twitter accounts, be careful – it’s actually against Twitter’s rules, and they’re pretty strict about it. On Twitter’s support page, it explains that username squatting is prohibited, and that attempts to “sell, buy, or solicit other forms of payment in exchange for usernames are also violations and may result in permanent account suspension.”
Trying to sell prime Twitter real estate, then, might result in the username being taken out of the equation completely.
Have It Taken Off You
That’s not the only way Twitter handles username squatting, either. If a brand or celebrity approaches Twitter to complain that their username has been taken by an impostor, Twitter sometimes decides to just hand over the account.
American blogger Sapphire used to tweet as @sapphirecut, until one day she woke up and found messages from Twitter explaining that, due to a copyright request, her handle had been transferred to someone else and her account had been renamed. After challenging the decision, she ended up with the handle @Sapphire, which is arguably better anyway – although her current bio does note “Am NOT a Lounge, Club, Event.”
An even more dramatic battle raged over ownership of the username @Chase. Chase Giunta originally registered the name in 2008, using the account for personal musings, but when he started receiving customer complaints meant for the Chase bank, he started retweeting them to make a kind of joke out of it. Unfortunately, JP Morgan Chase didn’t see the funny side, and decided the account ought to belong to it.
Giunta says he was contacted by a representative of the bank, who offered him the princely sum of $20,000 for it, but that he turned it down, telling them that it was against Twitter’s rules. The next day, he received an email notifying him that as he was impersonating the bank, he was violating Twitter’s policies. He changed his bio and picture to make it clear that he wasn’t associated with the bank, and was actually just a guy called Chase, but to no avail – his account was suspended, then handed over to JP Morgan Chase. Giunta had to register for a new account. Unsurprisingly, he went with @ChaseGiunta.
Just Deal With It
Of course, if no-one’s trying to actively take your username away from you, and the misdirected mentions aren’t proving too annoying, you could just… do nothing. That’s the path a lot of tweeters who share their usernames with more famous entities do.
Like @DavidCameron, which isn’t the official account for the British Prime Minister, but the account of a twentysomething who lives in Oregon. David Cameron is his name, and when he registered his Twitter account in 2007, Gordon Brown was still Prime Minister. It was only in 2010 that it started to become a bit of a problem.
However, though he does get a lot of angry tweets – particularly relating to the NHS – the American David Cameron mostly just thinks it’s funny, and replies to people as if they’re genuinely asking for his opinion (as an added bonus, President Obama’s Twitter account, @potus, follows him, which could be fun).
Other tweeters who take a similar approach include @Kraft (a guy called Brandon Kraft, not a cheese seller); @TheAshes (Ashley Kerekes, not a cricket tournament); @PJHarvey (software developer Phil Harvey, not the musician); @MSG (Michael S. Galpert, not Madison Square Gardens); @Heinz (Austrian academic Heinz Wittenbrink, not the beans company)… and lots, lots more. None of them set out to be cybersquatters, and they all have fairly obvious claims to the usernames they’re using, so they’re just carrying on as normal.
The Moral Of The Story
You might think this is a problem you’ll never have to worry about, because your Twitter name is something unique to you, or at least something that no big company is likely to want. But even the most innocuous seeming usernames can become troublesome. Just ask Chris Andrikanich. Nicknamed “Alphabet” because of his difficult-to-spell surname, he’d been using @alphabet since 2007… and then, in August last year, Google announced that it was creating a new parent company for its various services, and calling it Alphabet.
Within hours, Andrikanich’s mentions were blowing up. A wry tweet he made about the situation – “Well, that was an interesting way to end a Monday…” garnered thousands of retweets. Suddenly, his Twitter account was in the spotlight, with people speculating that Google would offer him a huge sum of money to hand over the account.
So far, though, that hasn’t happened, and Andrikanich is still tweeting using the handle, Since most people still seem to say “Google” instead of “Alphabet”, he probably hasn’t had a huge amount of trouble with it yet, but it does show that, like @DavidCameron, you could find yourself unexpectedly inundated with tweets for someone else, or even with your account suspended.
If there’s a lesson here, then it’s not about choosing a username – unless you want to go with a random keyboard smash of letters and numbers, you’re unlikely to be able to guarantee an unassailable one – it’s about making sure you check, before you tweet, that you’re @-ing the right person.
What If Someone’s Got Your Name?
Twitter has been around long enough now that a lot of the most desirable usernames have already been snapped up. If you go to sign up and find that your name has already been claimed by someone who doesn’t use the account, you might feel really annoyed. However, if you’re hoping to claim the username for yourself, I’ve got some bad news. Twitter used to disable inactive accounts, freeing up the handles for other people, but the policy has changed, and Twitter now just advises users to come up with variations on the name they want – by adding numbers, underscores, or abbreviations.