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Protect Your Brand

Elliot Silver
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A local city website from my hometown began following one of my websites on Twitter the other day. I had never heard of this city site, and they have a unique/brandable URL – which I won’t give away for their privacy, but it was something to the effect of CyaInNewton.com. Since I hadn’t heard of their site nor visited before, I decided I would have a look, and I saw that it was a fully developed city portal.

I wanted to check to see if there was more than one site in their network, and while I wasn’t surprised that there weren’t others, I was surprised that they didn’t buy other domain names to go along with their branding, ie CyaInNewYork.com or even neighboring cities like CyaInNatick.com…etc. These domain names are available for their competitors and/or anyone else who wants to grab them at registration fee. I think this is a big mistake.

This company isn’t a domain investment or speculative company, where they are hoping someone else will like their idea and decide to buy it at a premium. They are growing an actual brand on one domain name, and the logical way to grow once terminal velocity is reached is to extend to different markets. While the domain names are available to register now, they might not be in a few months. Although they might have common law trademark rights, getting the domain names they want could be expensive.

I am going to send them a DM and recommend that they grab their brand domain names in other markets. While they may not plan to grow to those markets, it can’t hurt to protect the brand they are working hard to promote.

Great Viral Marketing … errr Mistake

Elliot Silver
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Apparently Domino’s pizza made a big marketing mistake that was uncovered by someone looking to find a coupon code. The customer entered the word “bailout” when he was ordering his pizza online, and the website responded by saying his medium pizza was free.

The person then told other people about this error, and when all is said and done, there were about 11,000 pizzas given out for free by Domino’s. Although this was apparently an error, the viral marketing can’t be beat. In a move that cost them under $50,000 (assuming their cost per pizza is just under $5.00), they are now getting thousands of dollars worth of free press – not to mention all the sodas and other things people ordered when they found out their pizza was free.

Although this was a mistake, it shows how powerful viral marketing can be, especially in the age of Twitter and other instant news distribution outlets.

Advertising Age Weighs in on gTLD

Elliot Silver
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0

Advertising industry publication Advertising Age weighed in on the impact of the proposed gTLDs today. Although I would have thought an article about the creative possibilities of new gTLDs would have been more appropriate for Ad Age to cover, they focused on the costs associated with gTLDs – both in terms of applying for a gTLD and the cost of brand protection.

While their advice about research is smart, surmising that an up and coming energy drink company would could use a new gTLD (.powerdrink is their example) is pretty far fetched.   I can’t imagine a new brand spending $150k+ to apply for a gTLD such as this – not including costs of managing their registry.

I think there are still a lot of questions to be answered before gTLDs are approved, and Ad Age is correct in advising that their readers look into the implications of new gTLDs.   For readers of my blog, I will be posting an interview with Antony Van Couvering in the next few days, which should provide some good insight into new gTLDs.

Foreign Companies Using .US Extension

Elliot Silver
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I noticed something interesting during my travels and don’t know if it’s isolated or more widespread. In several advertisements, I’ve seen foreign companies who do business in the US using the .US extension for their primary American website or in addition to their primary .com site.

Although I haven’t really seen many American-based companies using the .US extension as a primary website, I know that country code extensions are very popular in places throughout the world – especially in some European countries.

IcelandAir uses IcelandAir.us, BMW sometimes uses BMW.us,  ClubMed has used ClubMed.us, Volvo uses VolvoCars.us (forwards to .com) and there are many other examples. It seems to be more of a European way of thinking as many EU people and businesses use their country codes far more regularly than we use the .US extension here in the States.

It’s just interesting to notice, as I have seen the above examples used to target US customers, and all of these companies own their respective .com – they just choose not to use them.

So what is it?   Foreign companies’ marketing departments not thinking like American consumers? A domain extension test?   Something else?   What do you think?

Twitter for Your Web Business

Elliot Silver
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7

I am a relatively new Twitter user, and although I might not be the best person to discuss the benefits of Twitter because of my limited experience, I want to share how I am using Twitter to help build my brands.   Twitter is a powerful tool that companies and people can use to promote and monitor their brands, as well as communicate with their customers.   In fact, many companies, schools, and politicians use Twitter and have a person or group whose job description involves Twitter communications.

For those people who aren’t aware of Twitter, it’s basically a rapid update service where users can enter short posts about what they are doing or what they are seeing. A perfect example illustrating Twitter’s usefulness is the day the US Air flight landed in the Hudson River.   Literally as the airplane was landing, people were adding Tweets about what they were seeing.   They also uploaded photos and videos to related sites, and several minutes before the news was reporting the accident, Twitter users knew about it – many of whom even knew it was a US Airways airplane.

How I use Twitter:

As a domain investor and domain blogger, I use the Twitter ID elliotsblog.   Most of my Twitter followers either found me by searching for my blog, seeing my initial blog post announcing my usage of Twitter, or found it through a specific keyword search.   As a result, I tend to post updates (“Tweets”) about what I am writing on my blog, what I see in the industry, breaking news related to the domain industry, and sometimes personal commentary. I feel like my blog is an extension of me, and I want my Twitter account to be an extension of my blog.   I see an increase in traffic when I post a link, and I find it’s a good way to communicate and have a conversation.

As a local online media professional with Burbank.com and Lowell.com, I’ve taken a slightly different approach in my initial days on Twitter.   The design of my Twitter accounts is an extension of their respective websites for branding purposes.   I haven’t really publicized my Twitter usage much with the sites (waiting until I am more knowledgeable and satisfied with the account look and feel), but once I am satisfied, I will add buttons on my sites to encourage people to follow my accounts.

The difference between my blog account and my local media accounts is that I have established relationships with domain investors, and I haven’t established many local relationships yet.   So in order to build my follower base on the media sites, I have been searching for specific keywords related to the cities and regions, and as I find them, I follow that particular Twitter user (assuming he isn’t simply announcing that he jut landed in Burbank).   The more Twitter users I follow, the more likely they will follow me and I will be exposed to their followers.

Just like they are able to follow my updates, I can also follow their updates.   If a major story is breaking in one of my cities, or someone writes an update about an event, I can be on top of it at the same time (or earlier) than the local media.   In fact, I learned about the Burbank Film Festival via Twitter a few days ago, and I will be adding information about it in the coming days.   This will then expose my account to the users who search for “Burbank Film Festival” on Twitter.   Perhaps they will add my account to their group of followers, and an update down the road will be of interest to them.

The exciting thing about Twitter is that I believe there are so many ways to use Twitter to meet potential clients or site visitors, find out about events, and stay on top of breaking news stories.   Twitter gives everyone a chance to be heard, and I can use it to extend the reach of my brands.

Will Twitter Buy Tweeter?

Elliot Silver
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4

When I was hanging out in Bido’s live chat room yesterday, someone mentioned the idea about Twitter   buying Tweeter.com, the domain name of the bankrupt electronics chain, Tweeter. I haven’t heard about an auction for the domain name, but I would imagine it will eventually be sold, and most likely via auction. There are a number of Tweeter-type references related to Twitter, including “tweets,” or the posts made by users, and “tweeters,” nickname of Twitter users.   There is also a “tweet deck” and other Tweet-related Twitter references that continue to be created.

That said, I find it unlikely that the still unprofitable company would buy Tweeter.com, although they did just receive an additional capital injection of $35 million. In my opinion, Tweeter.com will likely sell for somewhere in the mid six figure range, based on the valuable electronics shoppers who type it in or find it via back link. I don’t think that there are many people navigating to Tweeter.com in error thinking it’s Twitter.   A company like Flickr has more of a need for Flicker.com than Twitter has for Tweeter 🙂 .

It’s a valuable domain name for someone, but in my opinion, I don’t think Twitter will allocate the funds for it.

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