I would have been awake at 5am to nab my own username but due to heavy hayfever and a plethora of tablets that do nothing except make me drowsy, I slept right through until Saturday afternoon. Thankfully though, it seems my last name is relatively unique and I’m now the proud owner of facebook.com/philhancox. Along with twitter.com/philhancox and, of course, my own domain philhancox.co.uk, are there any more vanity URLs I should be snapping up?

Naturally a few funny and interesting Facebook usernames have also been registered. One of my favourites is facebook.com/defaults.aspx (of course, Facebook is primarily written in PHP but meh, it’s still genius) or facebook.com/index. I also quite like the mirror username facebook.com/moc.koobecaf and I’m sure with another 3 million or so vanity URLs registered, there will be another good few funny ones out there.

At the moment though I chose my vanity URL for the one reason they’re important: branding. With a Facebook URL, people and businesses (and those where the two are one and the same) can have their own shorter, attractive and more trustworthy Facebook brands instead of facebook.com/pages/blah/blah-blah-blah/01234567890 it can be facebook.com/business. Nice.

Facebook is realising Twitter is becoming a powerful tool that businesses are using to converse with their customers, and Facebook wants in on the action. Instead of businesses putting up signs saying follow us on twitter.com/business, they want them putting up signs saying check us out on facebook.com/business and vanity URLs are one step further at achieving this mission. We’ll see if vanity URLs help Facebook become a larger slice of the branding and social media strategy for businesses wanting to get closer to their customer.

Did you get your vanity URL? Friend me on facebook.com/philhancox (apparently if you change your username, you lose it for ever) and don’t forget to follow me at twitter.com/philhancox.

My kettle is broken… no more tea….. what will I do without tea?!

I woke up this morning and through perserverance, managed to make a half-decent brew by boiling water in a pan and, as usual, logged onto the net and came across the following two replies on Twitter by a company called Stylish Goods:

@philhancox If you like any of our kettles, we can get them sent to you in super-fast time.

@philhancox See if you like any of the kettles here:- http://is.gd/tOYw and you can have a 5% discount as a twitter user.

What an example of wonderful Twittermarketing! First of all, they seem personal and not just automated replies to the keyword “kettle”. They recognised my urgency my stating kettles have a fast delivery time. Score 3 points here; 1 for recognising my Tweet in their marketing message, 2 for triggering the thought process in my mind to view their website for kettles and finally for telling me about their delivery times, all in less than 140 characters.

The second Tweet just seals the deal for me, a nice link and a 5% discount if I decide to buy. Suddenly, this company isn’t just auto-replying any more, they’re helping me out and making me valued at the same time. Unfortunately for Stylish Goods, I’m in a student crib and the maintenance form has been sent off, meaning I should get a new kettle soon. However, I will be moving out soon and I’m so impressed that I will use them to buy a kettle for my new flat.

But whilst the Twitter messages got me involved and triggered my internal purchasing decisions, the website, sadly, turned me off a bit. Clicking upon the link given took me to a page where, above the fold, all I could see was a digital scale and half a hand blender. Where are the stylish kettles? I had to scroll down to see them which in usability (and conversion) fields is a big no-no. It would have been better to send me to the search results for kettle which does just show the kettles but unfortunately neither they nor I can link to because it doesn’t generate a unique URL.

I could mention a lot more about the site that could be improved, but I may save that for another time as I will be doing in-depth website reviews on this blog in the future. I just wanted to highlight Stylish Goods as they brightened up my morning with laser-targeted but effective and friendly marketing to a guy who is skeptical to such tactics. Congratulations guys, now improve your site to really capture those conversions.

This isn’t an advert, but it is a happy coincidence that this incident occured as only last night I was chatting to @hairycornflakes about his new tool, which is in beta release at tweetdock.com. It allows you to target Twitter users based on keywords and even geographical location and send them replies automatically (although you can check the messages first to ensure they will appreciate the message and personalise it for maximum effect). You can use it for more than one Twitter account which means if you have multiple websites, this could turn into one hell of an effective marketing tool and I look forward to using it myself. I’ll blog about the results in the future, but for now, take a peek and see if it could do anything for you.