One of the issues that comes up frequently with our clients is that they don’t have a systematic way to keep track of their online assets. What is an online asset?

It’s anything that you own that is online – examples are facebook pages, domain names, websites, youtube logins, twitter names. These are considered assets because they are corporate or personal representations of yourself. They are also considered assets because they can add tangible value to your company or brand. It makes sense that if you have a Twitter account with 100,000 followers that it is now a sale-able value for your company.

Many companies don’t have a standardized way of keeping their assets organized. Staff turnover can result in losing the information.

Recently, we tried to set up a YouTube account for a client with their corporate name. YouTube said that this channel name was taken (ex: youtube.com/corporatename) by someone else. When we checked who was using their corporate name, it was an empty channel that had been created in 2006. It is extremely likely that this channel was created by a student intern or entry-level marketing staff member with whom they have lost all contact.

Since a standard email account wasn’t used to set up the YouTube channel, the only way to gain access to this most important online asset is to go through the arduous task of contacting YouTube and negotiating ownership of an online asset that they likely set up for themselves five years ago.

Do you have a systematic and centralized method of keeping tabs on your online assets? If not, feel free to contact me to set one up.