In today’s digital world, personal branding is just as important as company and product branding. One needs to consider usernames, public names, pictures and profile management as part of the thinking. I am sure that like many other users, I did not think about this very much when I started my online work years ago. Over time I have recognized the importance of branding and worked to achieve high consistency in this area. I have settled an internet identity, and fortunately, I have managed to obtain my desired user ID on the wide variety of services I use with just a couple of exceptions.

One of the exceptions was on Skype. Once I realized what I wanted to do with branding, I registered a second skype account with my desired username, which was available. This at least held the account until I decided when and how I would either use two accounts, perhaps for different purposes, or migrate to the new account.

… many months go by …

I have been working through an interesting scenario. I registered my new account with a (then) relatively new but rarely used email address. After leaving the skype account dormant, I could not remember the email address used for registration. Skype searching did not yield any clues, and although I could see my registered account I could not change the password without the email address, and in turn I could not ask the folks at Skype to give me access without that email account.

I decided to take a long shot and put in a helpdesk ticket at Skype. As it turned out, the email address I had used was phased out by the host vendor. Even though I did not have the ‘key email address’ Skype staff provided me a series of detailed questions about the account which I was able to answer to verify my identity. Well, today was success day as I finally gained access to the account and now I can move forward with my plans.

Lessons Learned:

1. Use mainstream email addresses when registering for user accounts.
2. Use a ‘keep’ folder for important things like this.

I am writing this blog post as a shout out and thank you to the staff at Skype who were able to help me resolve this scenario. Thank you for having a good identity management process in place.

~Mark