Mark Ragan interviewed me last week while I was at the Ragan/eBay social media conference about the Glenn Tilton website. Tilton is the CEO of United Airlines, but the blog—and the domain—belong to the pilot’s union, which is calling for the CEO’s resigation or firing.

The video is featured on Ragan’s home page, but I’ll save you the trip (although Ragan.com pretty much always has content worth reading):

In the interview, I reiterate the importance of companies grabbing domains (and Twitter accounts and FriendFeed rooms) for their most basic names and trademarks. You can’t get them all, but United certainly should have considered the consequences of somebody else getting their hands on GlennTilton.com.

Richard Millington, over on his FeverBee blog, has taken issue with this notion, and to prove his point, he registered the Twitter account NelsonMandela, noting:

You can’t protect your brand name online. If NelsonMandela was registered then I could’ve picked NMandela, Mandela, NelsonM, Nelsieboy etc…If those were all taken on Twitter, I could’ve used Plurk or Jaiku. I could’ve registered NelsonMandela.typepad.com or on wordpress or blogger. I could’ve posted comments as him on any number of political forums.

I would argue that you can have the other names since they’re not the obvious official names that could easily be confused with the real person, company, brand or trademark. But Mandela (or his people) should have registered the NelsonMandela account, on Twitter as well as other social media properties. It’s also incumbent upon business communicators to be aware of new social media channels and grab the names there as quickly as possible.

Millington’s right when he says he could do little to sabotage Mandela’s reputation with fake announcements on Twitter, but why run the risk? And while the United pilots aren’t pretending to speak in Tilton’s name, not only are people visiting the site thinking they’ll find Tilton there only to encounter his most vocal opposition, it has generated scads of unwanted publicity that never would have happened if they had been relegated to registering something like TiltonS.com (on which, let’s face it, the union wouldn’t have wasted its time).