Natasa Djukanovic Interview on Thrive Global

Natasa Djukanovic is the Chief Marketing Officer of the .ME registry, a ccTLD extension from the country of Montenegro. As you probably know, .ME has been positioned as a mainstream generic TLD with an alternative meaning to its country code utility, since its domain names became available to register a little over ten years ago.

Thrive Global, an online publication founded by Ariana Huffington, recently published an interview with Natasa, and it is a good read. The interview offers some background about the .ME registry team along with some of its early marketing and promotion strategy. Here’s a brief excerpt of Natasha sharing some background about .ME:

“Our launch coincided with the global marketing movement where the focus moved from mass to custom services and from corporate to “human” branding. So, we gathered courage and aggressively advertised .ME as the go-to domain for the new movement in branding — personalization, both when it comes to businesses who want to make their business or service more personal, and for people who want to work on their personal brands. Today, .ME is known for both, so we did something right.”

In addition to sharing some background about the company that operates .ME and how she came to work at the registry, Natasa also shared 5 leadership lessons and a story or example for each of these lessons.

The .ME registry did a great job of marketing and promoting the extension over the years both in the domain name space as well as the startup space. Some of the strategies employed by .ME are used by other companies marketing different extensions today. I recall that .ME sponsored various startup events, helping to promote .ME domain names to an audience outside of the domain investment space. When I think of .ME, I think of it as an innovative domain name registry.

This interview with Natasa is a great read when you have a moment.