Sweetmantra: Internet Marketing Advice

Domain Names Are the Stars of Tinseltown Conference

Last week I was in Hollywood, California attending and speaking at DOMAINfest 2008, one of the domain industry's two big conferences. Attendance was up this year with nearly 700 people attending from more than 25 countries. Many of the attendees were domainers (domain name investors) looking to buy, sell, and network.

I attended a number of sessions over the course of the event and thought I'd share a few highlights:

"Domain Names and the Law"

Domain name legal expert John Berryhill cautioned domain owners to be wary of vaguely worded purchase inquiries that don't explicitly offer to buy the domain; they could be lawyers representing trademark holders who are trolling with a different agenda (e.g. gathering info for a future legal claim against the unsuspecting domain owner).

Berryhill says, "The best trademark search tool is Google," as opposed to relying on official trademark databases.

"Domainers Town Hall with Frank Schilling"

This session was a Q&A with Frank Schilling, one the most famous and successful domainers in the world. Here are some choice quotes from Frank:

• "Domain names ARE the Internet."
• "There's no shelf life on domain names...domains are like Cognac" - on domain names as assets.
• Owners of even just ten domains will be the media companies of the future."

When asked, Frank said he owns about 370,000 domain names that are managed as a business by a small team of five, including himself and his wife.

"Understanding the Big Picture"

Monty Cahn from Moniker provided some insights into the overall strength of the domain industry. Cahn says 70% of Internet users are using direct navigation (typing a domain into the browser address window) to get to a site. He also predicts that aftermarket (previously-owned) domain name sales will be a $1 billion business in 2010. Cahn estimates that also by 2010, 240 million domain names will have been registered. For reference, that's about double the amount that are registered today.

(My Tucows colleague James Koole helped with this report.)

2007 Digital Marketing Conference

The death of Princess Diana. The Bre-X scandal. James Cameron's Titanic.

Where were you in 1997? And what were you doing?

Although it seems hard to believe, this year marks the - gasp! - 10th anniversary of the Canadian Marketing Association's Digital Marketing Conference.

I'm on the organizing committee for this conference and we've really tried to pull out all the stops in honour of this year's first decade mark.

Some of the featured speakers we've lined up include Mike Murphy from Facebook, Chuck Porter from Crispin Porter + Bogusky, and Simon Assaad from Heavy.com.

Ipsos Reid returns for a second year with the results of The Canadian Digital Marketing Pulse survey and we've just added a very special surprise session for Thursday afternoon featuring four Canadians you won't want to miss.

The enormously popular roundtables, "The Experience Exchange," are back by popular demand, and yes, yours truly will be moderating one of the roundtables on podcasting.

If you're serious about Internet marketing, please join me and a few hundred other Internet marketing enthusiasts at the 10th annual Digital Marketing Conference in Toronto, Canada on Thursday, October 25 and Friday, October 26.

For more information and to register, visit the 2007 Digital Marketing Conference Website.

15 Cool Things I Learned at the 2007 CMA Annual Convention

I had the privilege of attending, and speaking at, the 2007 Canadian Marketing Association Annual Convention in Ottawa earlier this month. Here are a few fascinating tidbits I gleaned from the many excellent talks and presentations I attended:

• Marketers need to learn how to 'outsource' the marketing to the consumers.
• Marketers need to develop mechanisms to detect and nurture the brand ambassadors (i.e., those consumers who will willingly act as promoters).
• Mass advertising for the iPod didn't happen until 9 months after the product launched; until then it was all 'word of mouth' marketing by brand ambassadors.
  (Source: Dr. Joe Plummer, Advertising Research Foundation)

• "Don't fear theft of your ideas; fear obscurity."
• To today's 'Net Generation,' "choice is like oxygen."
• Google is the world's fourth largest computer hardware manufacturer (of data servers).
  (Source: Don Tapscott, New Paradigm)

• People want more of what they can get less of.
• 90% of people look for less risk (try to avoid risk) when it comes to making a decision.
• You are four times more likely to be a CEO in North America if you are over six feet tall.
  (Source: Heath Slawner, Hart Resource Development)

• 50% of complex search queries (in search engines) go unanswered.
• 40% of the Web is not searchable...yet.
  (Source: Owen Sagness, Microsoft Canada)

• WestJet receives 1,000+ unsolicited resumes a week.
• The airline has a Department of Culture that is responsible for "creating a remarkable (workplace) environment."
• WestJet holds retirement parties for the planes it takes out of service. At the last retirement party for a plane, over 600 employees showed up.
  (Source: Richard Bartrem, WestJet)

• 74% of bloggers say they are open to receiving product or service information from companies, but only 9% actually do.
  (Source: David Jones, Fleishman-Hillard)

Next year's CMA Annual Convention will be held in Toronto in May, 2008.

iSummit Diary: "Wife Crack" and "Branded Entertainment"

I attended, and was a speaker at, iSummit 2006, March 29-31, 2006 in Toronto, Canada. This entry is the second of two featuring my notes from the sessions I attended.

Xbox 360 Live Arcade

John David, the Lead Program Manager for Xbox Live Arcade, gave attendees a tour of this next generation videogame console's Arcade service and revealed some other interesting factoids about the 360:

• Arcade gives Xbox 360 owners who connect to the Xbox Live service the opportunity to download and sample 'simple' arcade games. All are free to sample, but in most cases a small fee is required to play the full game.
• 50% of Xbox owners so far have connected to the Xbox Live online service.
• According to John, Arcade is a way for Microsoft to get the game console "back into the family room" where it will be used by all members of the family, not just the hardcore gamers.
• 3 million arcade games have been downloaded through Arcade.
• Microsoft had expected an average 8.5% conversion rate of Arcade game trials to purchase, but have been getting a remarkable 20% conversion rate instead.
• I learned a new term; John referred to a few of the Arcade games as "wife crack," meaning a game, usually puzzle based, that is highly addictive to the female spouse of a male gamer. (Of course, lots of women play videogames, but "wife crack" refers to games that appeal to spouses who normally never play videogames.) Microsoft is very interested in these "secondary" gamers (the spouse) because that's where the growth in the videogame market lies. See also "gamer widow."
• While Microsoft's focus is still on making the 360 "an awesome games box" the Xbox 360 console has other capabilities that make it directly competitive with current and future offerings from other major players, including cable and satellite companies.
• Microsoft will soon be adding music videos and song downloads to the Xbox Live Marketplace, some free, some paid. Hello, iTunes? It will be interesting to see what will happen when (not if) Microsoft adds TV shows and movies to the menu. Background downloading of large media files is apparently in the works.
• Xbox Live is also a communications platform: 600,000 text messages a day are exchanged on Xbox Live between its members.

Branded Entertainment: R U 4 Real?

This session provided an overview and examples of "branded entertainment," long-form content that is partially or fully funded by advertisers as an alternative to conventional advertising tactics such as TV commercials. Examples featured during this session included:

• The Ringing: Created by GJP Advertising in Toronto, this three-minute online horror movie spoof is actually an ad for Covad Communications, a VOIP start-up. The movie features staff at a small business being terrorized by their phone system, before being saved by a Covad employee.
• The Swarm: On behalf of M&M Minis, BBDO Worldwide created a custom comic book with Marvel as well as an online "CyberComic." The objective of this campaign was to drive engagement with the brand by tweens. Shawn Zupp, BBDO's Director of New Content, told the audience that branded entertainment was chosen because it was deemed a "less passive and less predictable" media experience for the target market.
• The Adventures of Seinfeld & Superman: These short movies, dating back to 2004 and no longer online, featured comedian Jerry Seinfeld kibitzing with an animated Superman on behalf of American Express. Dave Sylvestre, Group Creative Director at Organic, described these as "opt-in entertainment" and said the goal was to be 95% entertainment, 5% advertising. For the record, I still consider the whole Seinfeld & Superman affair a PR stunt more than anything else.
• Nike Full Ride: Jeff Spriet, President of Chokolat (the "branded entertainment" arm of Taxi Advertising & Design) suggested that "associated entertainment" is a better name for the strategy as its goal is to create brand associations. To address what he called "TV commercial wear-out," Chokolat produced "Full Ride," a series of four 30-minute shows for Nike about up and coming college football players. Broadcast on ESPN last August and also available 24/7 on the Web at www.nikegridiron.com (although not any more, it seems), these 'TV shows' cost less to produce than a typical 30-second television ad and received a 0.2 share of the 18-49 year-old TV audience.

Finally, and as luck would have it, at one point during iSummit I found myself sitting next to Salim Ismail, Co-Founder of PubSub. If you're a blogger, or interested in staying on top of what bloggers are writing about, then you must check out PubSub. It's described as "a matching service that instantly notifies you when new content is created that matches your subscription." Fair enough, but you really have to try it to see its power. If you're familiar with the Google Alerts service, then you will have some idea of the usefulness of PubSub, which 'reads' over 23 million blogs. While not a new service (it's been around since 2004), PubSub isn't that well known among the bloggers and marketing practitioners I have spoken to. I'm on a mission to rectify that! ;+)

For more about iSummit I encourage you to check out the iSummit blog and the iSummit Website.

Domain Name Research Tools

As someone with more than a fleeting interest in domain names, I thought I'd share a few of my favourite domain name research tools with you.

DomainSurfer - DomainSurfer is a super-speedy domain name search engine that allows you to quickly conduct wild-card searches of domain names. You can quickly find out how many other domain names feature or begin with a word (or word combination) that is of interest to you. For instance, did you know there are 45,583 .com domain names featuring the word "Canada"? Take off, eh!

NameBoy - This is a very useful tool to turn to when you're stuck in the process of coming up with a new (and available) domain name. NameBoy's greatest strength is its ability to suggest alternative domain names for you to consider and indicate their availability. This is an invaluable resource when you've hit a mental roadblock.

NameProtect Free Trademark Search - Curious to know if that great name you've come up with has already been trademarked? This is a quick way to do a preliminary (and free) search for US and Canadian trademarks - and help keep the lawyers at bay. Did I mention it's free? ;+)

Enjoy!

You Must Become a Search Voyeur

As far as I'm concerned, you can't call yourself an Internet marketer unless you've spent at least 15 minutes contemplating the output of a "search voyeur" tool like Dogpile.com's SearchSpy.

While there are dozens of more statistically accurate tools out there, such as Wordtracker, that count and rank the millions of searches conducted on the Internet every day, there is no better (or more eye-opening) way to get a sense of how Joe or Jane Public actually conducts searches than a search voyeur tool.

SearchSpy, like most search voyeur tools, provides a real-time, 'behind-the-scenes' view of current searches by showing the actual search terms people are typing in. Although it's not for the faint of heart, the "unfiltered" version of this tool provides the most accurate view of how people search.

As I'm writing this, each and every one of the real-time searches scrolling by on SearchSpy reveals a wealth of insights for the discerning marketer:

food – This one-word, generic search suggests a rather naive search(er)? Remember, not everybody on the Internet is a rocket scientist.

"shock proof laptop" – Here's a three-word key phrase enclosed in quotation marks, very specific, from a sophisticated researcher looking for product information? Smart retailers of this type of product will have optimized for this specific phrase.

bikini waxing tips – It's a three-word key phrase, very specific, from someone looking for free advice. If you're the owner of a spa, does your Website feature tips?

phantom of the opera lyrics – A five-word key phrase, very specific, using a well-known brand, maybe from a fan looking to add to their collection? Are you taking advantage of the well-known brands you sell?

www.temeculawine.com – You'd be amazed how often people type URLs into search engines, either because they typed into the wrong box on their screen, or they are not clear about how to do a proper search! Is your domain name on your search engine marketing keyword short list?

cabin rentals in estes park, colorado – A vacation planner who knows exactly what he/she wants, perhaps? Let's hope the marketers of vacation properties in Estes Park have optimized for this phrase.

human reporduction – Here's a two-word phrase with a misspelling, another all-too common occurrence. Are you taking spelling mistakes into account when you plan your search engine marketing?

You owe it to yourself to spend a few minutes with a search voyeur tool like SearchSpy. Learning about the mind of the common searcher has never been so entertaining, and think of the fun you can have building a drinking game around this!

AdWords Espionage With GoogSpy

If you're a fan of AdWords, Google's popular paid search system, you'd probably love to get a behind-the-scenes view of how your competitors (or your clients' competitors) are using it. Before you hire a rogue operative to infiltrate the competition's headquarters, spend some time surfing GoogSpy. But be warned, it can be addictive!

GoogSpy is one of my favourite (albeit arcane) research tools, and I still can't believe it is both legal and free. GoogSpy has analyzed (and archived) millions of Google search results and allows you to do research into how other companies are using the AdWords system.

You can browse by company or browse by search term or just type in a company name, URL, or search term you are interested in researching.

If you type in a search term, for instance, you will see the URL of the different Websites that the AdWords ads link to for that term.

Click on one of the advertisers' URLs and you will be presented with the various search terms this advertiser is ranked in the top 10 for, the ad display ranking, and the text of their Google ads. You can also find out if this advertiser pays for any other Google search terms, what those search terms are, and get a list of their competitors (defined in this case as other advertisers competing for the same search term).

Back on the main results page, click on the search term and it will show you the advertisers that pay for that search term on Google, along with the copy of their ad and URL the ad links to. You will also see a list of other search terms that companies using that keyword use as keywords in AdWords.

One of the most valuable aspects of GoogSpy for Canadian Internet marketers is that it reveals what advertisers are buying even if you aren't located in the geographical region that their ads will be displayed in.

The best way to understand the power of GoogSpy is to spend some time experimenting with it. I find that the more I use it, the more I appreciate its value.

Next to conducting corporate espionage, GoogSpy is one of the best ways to do competitive AdWords research.