The proliferation of social networks makes it hard to keep on top of how your brand is being used and where. If you don’t claim your personal and business names, they very well might be used by someone else. A good example is the now-famous Fake Steve Jobs. a spoof blog of the Apple founder which has now evolved into various profiles on other social media sites.

There have been several high profile instances of this lately. The recently deleted exxonmobilecorp account on Twitter which was rumored to be an Exxon employee named Janet. She posted what she thought were supportive statements about the company and answering questions posted to her by her followers.

Initially people were fooled, but the longer she Tweeted the more apparent it became that she wasn’t an official representative and people started to look into it. Exxon finally came to life and after several weeks of controversy the account disappeared on August 14. Then she re-surfaced re-named as @NOT_EMC

As she explains it “@AndrewDavies, I am an employee of ExxonMobil, who has decided to put forward her pride in her own company”

Want to see a list of a few other sppofs, see who got Punk’d.

So what’s the lesson? Get on the social media sites and secure your personal name and your company brand names. Take the time to monitor social networks and set up alerts like Google Alerts so you hear about it if someone is talking about you. Search Twitter and use those feeds to keep on top of your own media spin. Better yet, start engaging people using your brand and get yourself some communication going.