Just in case you don’t follow me on Twitter, I received great news last week that I have been selected to attend the most amazing event, the NASA Tweetup, an invitation-only in-person meeting of space aficionados on Twitter.  The meeting takes place in the same area where traditional media hangs out.  There will be about 150 of us space geeks converging in Florida to watch one of the last shuttle launches.  This is officially the last funded launch, but NASA has stated that they will have one more launch to do some maintenance work on the Space Station.

Someone from a former NASA Tweetup crowd made the following image to show just why this meetup is special:

The Tweetup is planned for 2 days, although it is all based on the when the Shuttle Endeavour will actually launch (currently scheduled for 19 April 2011).  During those two days there will be socializing, chatting, special speakers, interviews, a ton of picture taking, more socializing…and watching the launch.  I hope.  It’s nice that I can stay the whole week if I have to.  Some other launches have been delayed — one for over 4 months. 

In preparation for this once-in-a-lifetime event for me, I’ve been trying to study up on the Shuttle program.  Early in my career I worked at Space Division in Los Angeles and in Washington, DC. The projects I worked on involved space initiatives, including shuttle missions.  I remember heading down to the officers club every time there was a launch or landing.  It was so exciting being in that environment, where people work working on efforts that truly expanded our knowledge of the universe.

I was also lucky in that I had a meeting in Washington, DC this past Monday, so I was able to spend a couple of hours at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. In a following post, I’ll share some of the photos I captured there.  I also watched Hubble 3D, an IMAX film about repairs made to the Hubble telescope during a previous mission.  What was interesting was that Astronaut Drew Feustel, who appeared in the film, will also be a crew member of STS-134, the Shuttle mission for this NASA Tweetup.  Drew is also a Boilermaker, attending Purdue about the same time I did.

As some other Tweetup attendees have said, I feel as if I have won a golden ticket to a most amazing experience.  I will be writing about this event over the next couple of weeks, but I promise to tie it all back to data and information.  Think of it as a DataChick view of space data.

Your mission: To write about branding. We have spoken to a LOT of people in the past two weeks about branding, often specifically about our brand, and the thoughts they are a-churnin.  Your blog should reflect however that word strikes you – whether it’s in personal/professional branding, software branding, our brand, product brands, or whatever.

We recently switched our branding back to “love your data” and away from “adding value to your information resources”.  We still think our former tagline is true, but Love Your Data is much more fun and still reinforces the need to take good care of your data.

So I was going to write about the value of brand, or how to protect your brand when I realized that the First Rule of Branding is to go reserve (grab) that brand, or the closest you can to it.  I’m @datachick on Twitter not because I think having a made-up Twitter ID is fun or cool, but because having a common name like “Lopez” means that every form of my name that I could come up with was already taken.  Not all of the combinations are being used, but they are already snatched up by people who may not ever use them. But because they were registered, they aren’t available to me.

I have a similar issue on Facebook.  My Facebook id is “lopezk” That’s closer to something real, but still not instantly recognizable, memorable or conversation friendly.

Now with LinkedIn I was an early adopter and I was also paying attention when the call for setting up your own personal link was announced and I managed to snag “karenlopez”

Heck, even on the Xbox Live system I thought for sure I could get some form of my name or Datachick, but even all the easy to remember forms for Datachick were already taken. So there I’m “DatachickXbox”.  Just like I’m my own gaming device.

On our own discussion lists I was also able to set up an ID of “karenlopez“, but that’s because I was the first user on the system.

So you can see what’s happened: I have several brands or IDs for myself scattered all over the Internet.  I can sometimes relate them to my brand by using the same avatar or the same logo or just to put them up together on one slide.  But I really wish that I could have my same brand everywhere.  By having a common name and joining late, I missed out on having a common brand for me personally.

In fact, on Twitter there are two other people who probably weren’t happy to find out that Datachick was already taken, so they came up with Datachix1 and Datachix2.  Now the brand is even further diluted and confusing.

So don’t wait to grab those brands where you can.  Even if you name is one of only two people with that name on the planet.  You never know when that other guy is going to grab “your” brand.