Brand Marketing

Dallas Cowboys Fumble Domain Name on Big Day for News as Coach Phillips is Fired

A few days ago I wrote about the Cowboys.com domain name going up for sale on Sedo, brokered by Dave Evanson. This came three years after the Cowboys infamously bid and won the Cowboys.com domain name at auction, but they didn’t complete the deal after apparently confusing the price, thinking the winning bid was $275.00 rather than the actual $275,000.00.

Apparently the Dallas Cowboys suffered another domain name  embarrassment today. It looks like the Cowboys didn’t renew its DallasCowboys.com domain name on time, and as a result, the default Network Solutions landing page is currently showing (complete with pictures of young soccer players).

This afternoon, the Cowboys fired coach Wade Phillips after their horrendous 1-7 start to the season. I am sure a lot of people turned to DallasCowboys.com (and probably Cowboys.com, too) to learn more about the firing, directly from the team. Unfortunately for them, they were disappointed in the Cowboys once again.

The good news is that the Cowboys appear to have renewed the domain name through 2020, and the domain name should soon  propagate  back to its website. The bad news is that the Cowboys will still be bad whether the website works or doesn’t.

Cooking Channels Owns .TV Domain But Doesn’t Use It for Branding

CookingChannelTV.comI recently noticed that my cable tv provider added a new channel to the already huge lineup. The Cooking Channel features a number of cooking shows featuring famous as well as up and coming chefs. I guess it’s probably because the Food Network focuses on more than just cooking.

While watching Kelsey’s Essentials, I heard her mention the url of the Cooking Channel’s website, and I was a bit surprised by what they chose: CookingChannelTV.com.  The Cooking Channel does own CookingChannel.TV (a name the company acquired sometime between May and July 2010), but they understand that most people know .com, so they are branding CookingChannelTV.com instead.

They do smartly forward the .TV domain name to their website, but it was somewhat surprising that they didn’t use .TV and do the reverse since that almost seems more intuitive.

Unfortunately for Scripps (the owner of the Cooking Channel), CookingChannel.com is owned by Reflex Publishing, a company that is known to not sell its great generic domain names.

GOP Issues “Pledge to America” Launches PledgeToAmerica.com

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When the 2010 election votes are fully tallied, it appears that the Republican Party will have won the majority in the US House of Representatives, and the Democrats will retain the majority of the seats in the US Senate.

As Representative John Boehner gave a non-celebratory “victory” speech, the GOP’s A Pledge to America took center stage, literally, as the backdrop behind Rep. Boehner. Corresponding with the “Pledge” campaign, PledgeToAmerica.com was recently launched.

It appears that PledgeToAmerica.com expired in February of 2010, and it was then purchased again in May of 2010. It’s currently registered to a Steven Conn of Scottsdale, Arizona, who is also the registrant of the Mark It Media domain name (MarkIT Media Group is listed as the Pledge to America website designer).

Interestingly, the registrant chose not to register APledgeToAmerica.com (strange since the branding all includes “A” in front of “Pledge”). APledgeToAmerica.com was registered on September 17, 2010. This domain name currently resolves to a Godaddy landing page.

Millions of Dollars in Publicity for a $1,000 Reward to Find Tiger Woods Cigar Guy

By now, you have likely seen the famous Tiger Woods Ryder Cup photograph, with the ball in mid-air heading right for the photographer, and an interesting-looking guy smoking a cigar in the background. In case you haven’t seen it, the image is above for your viewing pleasure.

Despite the shot looking cool, as the ball was headed directly for the camera, the real story became the hunt for the guy smoking the cigar. Dubbed “Cigar Guy,” the Be Frugal blog (BeFrugal.com) offered a $1,000 reward to whomever is the first person identify the person smoking the cigar. They are holding a contest because they want this guy to be their next spokesman.

The contest and $1,000 reward have generated millions of dollars in publicity. News outlets including Huffington Post, NBC Sports, ABC, Wall Street Journal, and CNN are covering this special offer with news articles and reports, all linking to the BeFrugal.com website. What would essentially cost the company $1,000 has brought them priceless coverage.

This is great viral marketing!

Boston Globe to Use BostonGlobe.com as Pay Site & Boston.com as Free Site

Editors of the Boston Globe announced that they are moving towards the paid subscription model, and they intend to use BostonGlobe.com as the portal for the paid news site, which will contain all of the articles currently found in the print edition. They will keep Boston.com as the free website for visitors who choose not to pay for subscriptions.

From a geodomainer’s perspective, I think it’s nice to see that the Boston Globe is going to reinforce that BostonGlobe.com is one website with paid news and content, while their city.com site, Boston.com, will remain free and presumably the most widely read. Boston.com will have event listings and really be the go to site for information about Boston, notoriety which I believe it’s already achieved.

From a blogger’s perspective, it will be interesting to see how this experiment goes. Rupert Murdoch has been talking about putting up a pay wall as have others, which was previously tried by the NY Times (owners of the Boston Globe) with their Times Select version (no longer running).

If newspapers successfully adopt the paid subscriber model, perhaps bloggers and others will follow suit. In my opinion, it’s unlikely that the paid model will work since there are still plenty of blogs and websites that make enough money from advertisers that a pay wall isn’t necessary. I am an avid Boston Globe reader, but I won’t pay to read it since there are plenty of other sources of free information.

Did Facebook Quietly Acquire FB.com?

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I read an interesting “Tweet” on George Kirikos’ Twitter feed this morning. According to Domaintools’ Whois History tool, the domain name FB.com changed hands on September 3, 2010. Prior to this change, the domain name was registered to the American Farm Bureau Federation. The organization owns FB.org, which might explain their willingness to part with FB.com.

FB.com is currently registered to DNStination  Inc., and it is registered at Mark Monitor, the same corporate registrar used by Facebook for their Facebook.com registration. Could Facebook have stealthily acquired FB.com? The domain name does not currently resolve anywhere, but it would seem to be a good domain name for them to own, especially with the popularity of url shorteners.

Ironically enough, there is a page on Facebook called “Petition to make www.fb.com an official link to facebook is on Facebook.” The group currently has 75 members. Perhaps they were on to something.

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