Protect Online Brand through Domain Names

Monte:-“Right. While we are on that subject, related to Market Leap and how successful you guys have been. Let’s talk about domain names specifically and how important those are for firms and, using your products and services and how they should be covering themselves from your point of view. And some of the experiences you’ve seen.”

Noel:-“We’ve known that this has been an issue for a long time but just now are companies waking up to it. I know a lot of people in this business that when they think about domain names and how can I use them to build a lot of traffic to a lot of different sites and maybe there’s some games being played there. From my perspective, and my client’s perspective this is really becoming a big brand issue, a reputation issue, when they allow either there competition or their affiliates or simply people that just don’t like them to start buying the spelling of their domain names and other things like that to contain there name, pull traffic away from there name, away from their brand and begin to control the keyword space that they are around. That is really where it starts, with that domain name. So luckily we have gotten a lot of these customers and with your help getting these customers up to speed on these practices, when it comes to making you’re out there buying all those names and trying to get a hold of them, and understanding all the ICANN processes and the dispute resolution processes. And what kind of rights and actions they can take to manage this risk”

Monte:-“Right, Right, That’s actually going to be a great topic that we are going to talk about with Dr. John Berryhill in a little bit, some of the UDR proceedings, how someone goes about filing a UDR complaint and you know, if there is one piece of advice that we can give to everybody out there it is definitely to spend the money that is necessary to cover yourself on the internet.”

Noel:-“It’s nothing compared to what it will cost you later on.”

Monte:-“Right. Most of the domain names that you will buy for your online identity will be one time purchases. You will not be reselling them. It may seem expensive in some cases when someone else owns them, and they are asking for a premium on some of those domain names. But if you’re thinking about being in business long term there is nothing better that you can do but cover yourself. You know, when domain names become famous or brand names become famous and they are not covered. Watch out, that’s when it gets really hard and expensive to cover yourself.”

Noel:-“Yeah. And for all the search engine marketers listening out there, this is a great service that you can add to your package. When you are managing relationships with your clients and you say “We can help you in this area and we can add it on” and it become a great way to diversify your revenue. And for the webmasters out there that work in in-house this is a great way to get a feather in your cap if you can take this knowledge and information to your corporate marketing department and your legal staff and say ‘Hey, I know something about this and you guys aren’t watching it,’ and it can certainly help you out on your own career path if you are working inside a big enterprise,”

Monte:-“Oh, definitely, and not just the misspellings but you have all the other ICANN accredited extensions, that you can cover yourself in. It is mostly dot com work but, we are now starting to see that now, that people are starting to build there brands on other extensions. Because their primary brand is not available anymore. So do yourself a favor, cover yourself with the variable extensions that are now available, you know, hot off the press today was the announcement that ICANN is one step closer to approving 2 new extensions which is .moby, which is an online mobile domain network and .jobs. The .moby one seems kind of funny but, what happened was the Microsoft, Nokia and Sun Microsystems all got together and are going to create a registry for the .moby extension so that people can start using domains on cell phones and wireless devices.”

Noel:-“Yeah, that’s awesome.”

Monte:-“So you know , it just validates out point that this is the foundation product, the domain and how important it is to cover yourself both legally and to cover your brand across various extensions.”

Noel:-“And to move into those new markets like .moby, when the cell phones are going to start attaching to that. You know, a lot of people here may know this, but it’s an important thing, articulating it to your client and making sure that they understand that it is important. Even though they may not be interested in .moby or in .info or .fm or whatever the extension is. They can buy your name dot anything and show up in the search engine results and cause you some heartache.”

Monte:-“Yeah, definitely.”

Noel:-“And that is a big, big part of the game. I really see that part of the space is going to grow tremendously this year.”