Ah! Keri... a very important point... yes, better to secure your brand name as a handle on social channels...absolutely!

Actually my experience has shown that keywords in the handle actually look spammy and most people tend to not take that account seriously.. Infact I myself had deleted a lot of follows who either had a keyword in their handle or a graphic of some sort. I cleaned my follow list to ensure I was getting tweets from people and not automated systems. I am probably digressing here... sorry....