I wish I could site the source to give credit where credit is due, but still wanted to pass along this graphical, flow-chart style quick overview of various popular social media sites. If only Anthony Weiner had carried a wallet-sized cheat sheet with this information.
Social Media at a Glance
Have you tried to register a domain name in, oh say the past decade? Tough isn’t it? Seems just about every good domain name has already been taken – whether currently in use or simply purchased and parked by a cybersquatter hoping to sell it to you.
Well, today ICANN (the company that decides and manages these things) announced the expansion of domain name suffixes of the .xxx (AKA Generic) variety. What’s that mean? It means that instead of registering and using a domain name with the standard suffixes of .com, .net, .edu, .gov, .name, .org, .mil, .int and .biz you can now register just about anything. But before any of you would-be bloggers or cybersquatters log in to your GoDaddy account and register .TodLock, .Walmart or .ExxonMobile, you might want to check your PayPal account for sufficient funds.
Come January 2012 you can register a new domain suffix for the low, low price of only $185,000.00. That’s US money folks, not Pesos. Why would somebody spend that kind of coin on a domain name suffix? It’s not only for vanity, SEO (search engine optimization), advertising, trademark preservation and to drastically reduce cybersquatting of domain names, but also it’s a whole new way to make money which in turn will change the way the world uses and surfs the web.
Let’s say my rich Uncle Abdul the Arabian Prince drops his wallet and $185K falls out. I scoop up the cash, fill out my application and camp out overnight to be first in line to register the domain suffix “.dfwnewcardealer”. Now I’m the registrar for that suffix and can charge people to have their website name in front of it. So what? While it doesn’t mean much right now, you can bet the search engines (Google, Bing), internet security companies (McAfee, Symantec), web filtering software specialists (Websense, Barracuda), registrars (GoDaddy, Tucows), and other effected parties will change their offerings and algorithms very soon.
As the registrar for .dfwnewcardealer, I have my standards. I will check on dealers with the Better Business Bureau, read customer reviews on the web, and maybe even visit each car lot before accepting a car dealer’s application. While I can’t do anything about pushy car salesmen, web surfers can feel confident that any car dealer represented by my domain suffix is not a fly-by-night outfit. Further, I’ll advertise my own site www.find.dfwnewcardealer and help drive traffic to my clients’ websites. While the 2,000 bucks per year I will charge is 100 times higher than it costs to register a dot com name, that’s a drop in the car dealer’s advertising budget and the incremental traffic and revenue from being found on .dfwnewcardealer – a trusted and popular domain suffix – results in enormous ROI for my clients. All I have to do is find 185 new car dealers in the DFW area to give me $2K per year and I’m making a 50% gross profit margin before my own overhead and marketing costs. While this is an oversimplified, low volume, and geographically specific example, you get the idea. Now what if I owned .Travel or .Airline???
Let’s say I’m the Chief Marketing Officer of Ford Motor Company. I register the suffix .Ford, then internally charge all my product line managers to use it. For example: www.mustang.ford, www.focus.ford, and so on. But wait there’s more! I could also include a domain suffix fee in the franchise agreement for all my dealers, approve and allow after-market parts manufacturers and even certified independent repair shops to use it. Since I know the value of word-of-mouth marketing, I’ll probably allow any Ford fan club with at least 50 members to use it for their website for free.
Let’s say I’m a web filtering company such as NetNanny who sells software to protect your kiddos from accessing inappropriate websites. Unfortunately, to do that effectively I must constantly index and search websites for that bad content, add it to my list of millions of blocked websites, and then push out updates to you almost daily. Why not just register the generic top level domain suffix “.KidSafe”? I’ll combine the domain registration service with hosting where all the websites on .kidsafe use my servers and I can scan and approve all clients’ content changes instantly instead of scanning the entire web every single day. Then I’ll give away my web filtering software to home users who are assured that any website with a .kidsafe domain name is 100% OK. Just seems like a much better and profitable business model to me.
In marketing we call this “disruptive” because it changes the whole industry. Competitors cannot simply lower their prices or spend more on advertising; they will have to change.
How disruptive? That’s up to consumers – meaning you. Back in the dot com heyday of the mid 90′s every geek with a business plan and elevator pitch promised to “change the paradigm” of something via the web. By the dot bomb days of 2000 however, if you heard somebody say “change the paradigm” with one hand outstretched for venture capital you ran away as fast as you could. Turns out consumers didn’t want to wait a week for dog food and medicine ordered on a pet website to arrive while Rover shit all over the carpet and got fleas.
Last week I moved my kitchen trash can from the utility closet to the pantry closet. It’s closer to the sink and stove, and much more convenient. Or at least it will be once I stop opening the utility closet and wondering where the hell I put the trash can. Let’s face it, people usually hate change even when it’s good for them.
Plus, who really cares about (most) websites anyway? Like most people, I have about a dozen sites bookmarked and I’ve forgotten why I saved half of them.
Today it’s 
not about the website; it’s about the content and interactivity. And that, in turn, can be accomplished on Facebook without knowing the difference between html and a hole in the ground. Plus, people barely use websites anymore – it’s all about the app and mobile devices. While ICANN has been thinking about this change for the past three years, smartphone adoption and now tablets have been growing at approximately a gazillion percent per year.
So while this change of generic top-level domain suffixes has the potential to disrupt and improve the web industry, I wonder if by the time it’s in effect and potentially adopted by the masses whether or not anybody will notice or even care due to the wholesale change in how and where we access the web.
Now I’m going to download an app for my iPod so I can find the kitchen trash can.
There’s an offering in Google Adwords called call metrics for phone extensions. If you extend your ad with a phone number, then it can appear clickable on mobile devices with browsers, and when the (high-end mobile device) user clicks to call you get charged for a click and that’s great, because assuming the call goes through it’s also a conversion.
But, if you enable call metrics for a phone extension, a custom “redirect” number appears on your text ads for each campaign on desktop browsers too and you can report on the placed, answered, and missed calls, and even the call duration. However, unless that call originated as a click from a mobile device you don’t get charged the click price. That means Google is offering a free yellow pages service with call tracking statistics, and if the desktop user simply sees the ad and picks up the phone without clicking the ad first, it’s a free lead.
For now anyway. It says it’s a new service and subject to change. Available to select USA advertisers only. Just remember to manually add the number of received calls to your conversion totals then recalculate the average cost per conversion to include those conversations. Also, you can only view the call statistics at the campaign level, not by the ad group or ad or keyword.
Just don’t tell any of my competitors about this, because not many are taking advantage of this feature.
I just installed the Akismet anti-spam plug-in for comments, plus a secure contact form with a CAPTCHA code. Hopefully this will save me from deleting 100 spam posts per week and deter all those crafty Nigerians who need my bank account number in order to transfer 10 million dollars.
Please pardon the construction zone that is this website. I am searching for widgets and a secure, spam-free contact form for this new WordPress theme, plus will add social media links soon. For now I have populated the pages and need to add tags…..lots of tags.
