An article appeared on CNN today talking about a product called “Mingle Sticks,” which are very hot at big conferences and other gatherings. According the company that produces them (Mingle360), a MingleStick is “a small, inexpensive keychain device that allows people to exchange identity information with a simple click of a button.” Pretty cool device if you ask me.
What’s not cool is that this company, whose main product is now more well-known than the actual company name, doesn’t own the exact match domain name MingleSticks.com, although it does own the singular MingleStick.com. Since people are probably as likely or more likely to look for the plural rather than the singular, they dropped the ball on this. If you are wondering, MingleSticks.com was registered after the singular in 2008, and it’s now parked.
It’s my opinion that a company should register its main product domain names, both singular and plural, to protect its brand online (at the very least). Whether the company opts to use both or not is something that should be discussed with a search engine optimization expert and web developer, but it’s critical to at least control the domain names.
Instead of simply forwarding the plural domain name to the singular as they could have done if they bought it, the company will now end up paying Google or Yahoo to send them the visitors – a whole lot more than $8.00/year for the domain registration.
Another one I read about just yesterday…BankSimple. So I load BankSimple.com and it is parked…they are using BankSimple.net. A start-up with a small team but one dude is an original at Twitter and the concept is very interesting. The loss in this space will be very pricey though using the .net vs acquiring .com
Iphone has this built in it’s called bump
Believe it or not, but I bought my current company from one of the founders of Mingle360 – who also worked for me at Respond.
BTW not a big believer in domains – and he was our SEO “expert”. Time reveals many answers – in that debate – time has proven that domains are an excellent SEO tool. His concern was too many domains result in google flagging your site for duplicate content. While that is a valid point, there are ways to address this issue including shutting off spidering on duplicate domains
Even domain forwarding would be better than allowing someone else to monetize your brands 🙂
Poken makes these things as well. They graduated from DoYouPoken.com to Poken.com via a $75k purchase through Sedo
http://domainnamewire.com/2009/11/09/social-business-card-company-buys-poken-com-for-75000/
Unfortunately they don’t own Pokens.com, it’s parked at GoDaddy.
Hi El,
Weren’t you there at the 2007 Domain Roundtable that I produced for Name Intelligence? (now owned by Thought Convergence).
I was the first to introduce this “digital networking device” called nTag, at a domain conference, and it worked fantastic. It also enabled us to hold sessions where the audience could vote real time on questions relevant to domaining, and the results would appear on the projection screen, already broken into percentage of votes, etc. The device could also mark all the booths you visited, where those who visited all of them could compete for a prize.
It’s an unbelievable product, and I still recommend its use at any large conference, and especially at domain conferences where getting as many contacts as possible is good for all.
Their site is http://www.ntag.com. Ron Jackson wrote about it on DNJ back in 2007.
But back to the real sad story you wrote… these people didn’t get their domain! Yipes! This is a clear case of uneducated marketing.