In social media, your identity means everything and it’s the very foundation that builds on your brand recognition, development and reputation management. As such, you may have secured for your brand its own domain name with a fully furnished Web site, jumped onto various social media sites and have also begun attracting and building relationships with your followers along the way. Good on ya.

As you continue to exist online, there will always be some new social network cropping out of the woodwork. And as they pile up the social Web, it’s important to secure your name on each one of them to make sure you have control over your brand’s identity online.

We’ve all seen those bogus Twitter profiles and Facebook spoofing accounts; having a not-so legit profile masquerading as you can’t be good. And behind these you have your common online grafters hoping to sneak in a scam every now and then using your name, and possibly disgruntled former clients who have sworn to bring you down.

You have to be prepared too, after all, a lot of us didn’t really foresee Facebook’s blitzkrieg-esque rise and stripping MySpace of its social media rockstardom. What’s more, taking hold of your brand name on multiple online platforms can give you the leverage to take advantage of the online marketing opportunities they offer. This, of course, takes account of their various unique areas of focus and their own array of followers.

This goes for domain names as well. If you could recall back in the late 90s, people hoping to visit the official Web site of the presidential home got an outrageous surprise of the kinky kind after typing www.whitehouse.com.  Of course, all government sites were relegated to utilize the .gov top-level domain name, but at the time, this was not popularly known to the average Joe and so on to the .com they went. What most popular brands do nowadays is they get their site on the usual .com fare and then procure its other top-level domain equivalents and have them direct to their actual Web site.

To claim your identity online, here are three Web services that can definitely help you.

Username Check

Quite meta, Username Check searches through 50 social media sites, tagging each for username availability. It’s a one-page service for easy usage; just enter the name you intend to use for your online identity, hit the Search button and you’re good to go. Aside from displaying the status of your username across these sites, you also get a summary of the results for a quick glance and sharing options. You automatically get a shortened URL that points to your results page and an option to directly send it via e-mail using either its own sending feature or other services like Yahoo Mail, Gmail, Hotmail, AOL Mail and Microsoft Outlook.

NameChk

Created by David Gosse, CEO of search engine developer Vortaloptics, Namechk can research for your username’s availability in one simple interface. This is, of course, far better than having to visit each and every social Web site and checking your username for yourself. All you have to do is type in your desired username and this service will check 152 of the most popular social media sites in one go. These include your usual social networks, blogs, microblogging services, news aggregators and multimedia hosting sites. But if you think a site is missing from its ranks, there’s a Suggest a Site feature to have it included in future updates.

KnowEm

KnowEm expands username availability check into a full featured subscription-based service. It conducts searches across 300 social media sites which are nicely organized according to niche and platform like Blogging, Bookmarking, Entertainment, Microblogging, Music and News among others. You can also search by domain name, from the popular .coms, .nets or .orgs to country specific top-level domain names.

You can also opt to sign up for any of KnowEm’s subscription plans which include social network signups and profile creations. The free, basic plan handles one username but you will have to do most of the profile registrations, e-mail confirmations and actual account creation yourself, while the premium $599 Enterprise plan will secure for you up to two usernames, register them on 300 social networks, complete the registration, and fully furnish your profile for each one

Tags: KnowEm, NameChk, Online Identity, reputation management, Social Media, social networks, Username, Username Check