Google made news again this week when the search giant released Chrome, its first Web browser. We’ll be following Chrome over the next few weeks, and will report back soon on what impact the new browser might have on your search marketing campaigns.
It was interesting to find out that many companies started specific marketing to moms campaigns only during the past five years. The M2Moms Conference and BlogHer Conference launched just three years ago. Agencies large and small started specializing in the mommy market as late as 2003. Read more…
Getting “free stuff” makes me feel good about a brand. Many of us feel the same way. And all we have to do is give up a phone number or a mailing address.
by Anne Holland, Founder
If you, like many marketers, are in charge of deciding which domains to buy for your company or brand, this news is for you.
Over the past week, several Sherpa readers received emails purportedly from Internet domain officials in various Asian countries. The letters explain that someone in that country is trying to register a local version of the domain the US brand already has registered as a “.com.” So, for example, if your brand held “widgets.com,” the letter might tell you someone is trying to register “widgets.co.jp” for Japan.
The letter then explains that you as the .com owner have first dibs on international versions, and can stop the other guy from registering your brand in that country by simply registering it yourself right away. “Just click on this link!”
Yeah, it’s a scam.
That doesn’t mean that your domain might not be registered by someone else in a foreign country. Just probably not right at this moment. And the country’s registrar would not email you a warning note in English with a handy ‘click here to buy the domain yourself’ hotlink if it happened. It’s your job (or your legal department’s) to patrol domains, trademarks, and other branding conflicts internationally.
Should you register your domains in other countries? It depends. Consumers and businesspeople overseas are definitely used to going to ‘.com’ addresses. In fact, a lot of businesses based outside of the US have a “.com” as their primary home. People don’t assume a “.com” must be American; .com has become more of a universal term for “commercial web site” for many countries.
However, if you have a specific presence in a particular country – a division dedicated to that country or at least an office and/or dedicated customer service reps there — you may want to own a local domain extension as well as the .com. This is especially important for giant multinational brands. By creating sites with local domains, you show you really do care about the regions you’re doing business in. You add the power of local to your global brand.
One last note, as a part-time resident of Serbia I’m very aware of something that your Web team may not know yet. That is, the old “.yu” domain extension which was originally invented to represent “Yugoslavia” and is used for both Serbian and Montenegrin webites, will stop working shortly.
Yugoslavia no longer exists, of course, and Sedia and Montenegro are no longer a single country. Domains (and matching email addresses) for Serbia should now end in a “.rs” — short for Republic of Serbia. Domains for Montenegro should end in “.me” until such time as they switch to “.ru” (Not really. That’s just a little local real estate industry joke.)
A couple of online resources about international domains:
DNXPERT Daily Domain Blog
http://www.dnxpert.com/DomainsInfo English language version of international site
http://www.domainesinfo.fr/english.php
In an earlier blog post, I wrote about my hunch that email marketers would be using the rising gas prices and our slumping economy as copywriting tactics this summer. What do you know? I was right – at least when it comes to the gas prices.
Last week, we invited 35 MarketingSherpa Members to a virtual roundtable discussion to tackle a question we’ve been hearing quite a bit about recently: “Are white papers still effective?”
From our standpoint, the answer is a resounding “yes.” Data show that white papers are still an integral part of the business buying cycle:
PR misses the mark when it comes to pitching bloggers. It’s a complaint I’ve heard over and over again in almost every blog-centric interview for MarketingSherpa’s Fame newsletter.
Complaints range from how much bloggers hate receiving cut-and-paste press releases to how often the press releases are off topic. I think this confirms the conclusion: PR isn’t about pitching press releases any more. It’s about building relationships.
A few months back, I had a chat with Josh Stinchcomb, Publisher, Wired Digital. The company encompasses Wired.com, Ars Technica, Webmonkey and reddit — all of which feature user-generated content to some degree.
Josh and his team strive to build smart ways to engage their sites’ communities. I poked around after our conversation and realized he wasn’t kidding. Conversation is rampant on those sites.
When customers talk about your brand online, those conversations last for a while. They sit in article comments, in forums and on profile pages, waiting to be spidered by search engines. Every one of those enduring comments is a piece of mini-media that either builds your brand’s credibility or stains it.
