Sweetmantra: Domain Name Strategy

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.

I'm a Snuffleglot Engineer from the Planet Zulothar

I'm loving my new job as General Manager of the Domain Portfolio for Tucows, however I have identified one thing I don't like:

Nobody understands what I do for a living!

OK, maybe a few people - my colleagues and others with specific domain name industry experience - understand the nature of my role. For the vast majority of people I speak to, however, I might as well be telling them I'm a Snuffleglot engineer from the planet Zulothar.

This was made painfully obvious to me during a party I recently attended when the inevitable "what do you do for a living?" question arose.

Pre-Tucows, I used to introduce myself as someone who worked in the Internet marketing industry, this time I responded by saying I manage a large domain name portfolio for an Internet company.*

Blank stares.

Then a question I guess I'm going to be hearing a lot:

"Domain names? You mean Websites?"

Clearly I have lots of educating to do about the domain name space, which I love to do - don't get me wrong.

It's no surprise people are confused. The domain industry has its own arcane lingo (drops, redemption periods, TLDs, etc.) and hasn't done the best job explaining itself to the general public. That's going to change - it has to - and I'm delighted to be working at a company that recognizes this.

For the time being, though, I'm a Snuffleglot Engineer from the Planet Zulothar.

* Yes, for the record, I still consider myself to be working in the Internet marketing industry.