Is your brand your domain?

In June there was an announcement by iCann, the global domain name registration authority. And if you are a branding strategist, corporate identity manager or brand positioning and design consultant, then there's something you need to know. Along with .car .sports and .bank there's a new Top Level Domain:

.brand

Applications for new these new TLD's will be accepted from 12 January 2012 to 12 April 2012. However the approval of the .brand (dot brand) top TLD creates both opportunities and issues for brand owners.

ICANN apparently plans to allocate only a maximum of 500 .brand extensions each year, however it is expecting to receive thousands of applications (estimates are anywhere between 1000 and 4000 requests). However expect a bun fight for those names that are used in more than one context. Brands who share names are going to have to to resolve some pretty fundamental differences.

Polo anyone?

Creating a company domain name process

I've been blogging a fair bit recently about cybersquatting and how you can deal with it once it has happened.

However, prevention is always better than cure. So its always worth considering what you can do to ensure your exposure to future cybersquatting activity is minimised.

The best advice I can give on this subject is to create a domain naming process for your organisation. This doesn't have to be complex, but it really should be done if you want to reduce the effect of this nefarious activity.

A basic process is something like this:

1. Conduct a domain name review within your organisation. This means gaining an understanding of all current and future project/brand names you are likely to be using.
2. Prioritise this list of brands according to business & brand impact and their availability.
3. Agree where your cut-off point is . In other words... recognise where the cost of buying and maintaining domain becomes greater than the impact a cybersquatter would have if it got hold of one of them.
4. Make sure there is one individual (ideally a role not a person, as people move on) responsible within your organisation for the upkeep of this list, domain registration authorisation and liaison with your domain naming company.
5. Register the domains that are available (or set up a plan of action to get those back that are possible)
6. Agree a process internally for reviewing domain names going forward. New projects and initiatives come along all the time and its easy to assume that because its done once that you are not susceptible to the same thing happening in the future.

Cyber squatting - digital brandjacking

I’ve previously briefly covered the topic of Cybersquatting in a posting on brand jacking back in October, but thought that the topic deserved more thought and detail.

Cybersquatting, also known as domain squatting, is when someone deliberately registers a domain name that is relevant to your brand (product, service, organisation or even person). They do it in a deliberate act to either deny you of it, to make money from your brand equity, or with the intention of selling (read: ransoming it) it back to you.

The actual issue of whether this activity is actually illegal depends upon your country of residence, as it is a federal law in the USA to do this under the American Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anticybersquatting_Consumer_Protection_Act

However most countries have no legislation to cover this and therefore they have to resolve the issue through the Uniform Domain Name Resolution Policy (UDRP),This is an international process set up by ICANN, however the chances of getting a name back varies from situation to situation and is more tricky if your cybersquatter resides in another country, especially places such as China and Russia.

So what can you do about it?
Well I hope to be covering that subject in subsequent posts...

Have car companies really learnt anything from Toyota?

Last week I blogged about how Toyota had launched their social media listening site called http://toyotaconversations.com/. Throughout the social media world this was seen as a positive move to claw back the reputation of a leading global automotive manufacturer.

However today I was prompted to do a little investigation after following the Twitter stream of Neville Hobson who was attending and speaking at the Motor Industry Public Affairs Association 'New Influencers Workshop':

Brilliant suggestion by @thomaspower to auto co's: aggregate all conversations
on a convo domain, eg, toyotaconversations.com #mipaa

http://twitter.com/jangles/status/11366835384

Yes, this is a brilliant suggestion and one that I would have been surprised had not been already adopted by other motor manufacturers or their PR agents. At the very least this sort of activity should be in planning, given that it took Toyota and Tweetmeme only a few days to put the Toyota Conversations site up.

So I took a quick look at the [company]conversations.com domains available in that industry. I therefore found that the following domains were available to be purchased (e.g. they have not already been bought, a good indication of what they have planned):

• vauxhallconversations.com
  (agreeably Vauxhall is a UK-only GM brand)
• gmconversations.com
  (so that scratches that thought)
• saabconversations.com
• fordconversations.com

I could have checked more...and maybe I will after this post.

Now I could forgive all these, as this was a Toyota-specific issue that they have dealt with via the social web. But you'll be even more surprised to know that this domain is also still available:

• lexusconversations.com

For those that are not aware, Lexus is the prestige brand of Toyota. It would seem that even the parent company hasn't reserved this domain yet for its own PR purposes. Are they really that sure they won't need it in the future, given what has happened to their main brand?

Note:
I take no responsibility for these domains being taken by domain squatters or brandjackers following this post. All domains mentioned are available as of 15:45 on 31 March 2010.

Domains are still in great demand

Its nice to know that despite being in a bad economy and prophets of doom & gloom everywhere, that somethings are still attracting a ridiculously-high price. No I'm not talking about banking executives pay or the price of strawberries at Wimbledon Tennis Week (Prediction: even these won't be as expensive as last year), but domain names.

So how much are they worth? Well, what someone is prepared to pay, since they are the epitome of the free market economy. And now Toys'R'Us has has bought toys.com for $5m.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7923433.stm

With online still growing, could this turn out to be a great decision (or the next ABN Ambro)?

Cinema ratings for UK websites

Last month there was the usual main-stream-media merry-go-round we get once every few years, about rating websites depending upon their content. The fear is that juniors will see stuff they are not supposed to (but in reality I think its mainly so that adults will know what they are looking at). There did seem to be a lot of debate still going on about whether the UK should implement a series of ratings similar to those used for films (e.g. U, PG, etc.).

But hang-on, don't we already have a way of rating websites and one that was built into browsers some years ago?

PICS - ever heard of it? Nope, I don't suppose many people have. It was the Platform for Internet Content Selection and backed by various companies (including Microsoft at the time). It was supposed to be a self-regulating set of site classifications that coders would put in their sites. But for some reason this whole project seems to have been a bit of dead-ended venture and its been left to software companies to produce packages which call up black lists of no-go site.

On top of this, if everyone is so worried about our children accessing unsuitable material on the web... why not just create a specific Top Level Domain for such things? You could then develop a very simple filter that would exclude all content with this TLD. You could even call this domain .xxx and you could gain the acceptance of the $12 billion online porn industry in its implementation

Oh yes, that's right, that idea was tried for over 5 years, only to be cancelled at the last minute (which was nothing to do with powerful American religious groups lobbying the USA Government at all, honest).


One better suggestion may be to set up a children-only domain name.

'Dot Kid' anyone?