I was eating my wheaties this morning and reading my monthly copy of Sales and Marketing
Management, only to find a article about what Afilias is doing on the marketing of
the dot-info domain. I shall reserve my comments. (I think this article
does support my theory on the dot biz name potential for success with marketers)
______________________________________________________________________Article
from Sales and Marketing Management Magazine, February 2002 issue
http://www.salesandmarketing.com
The
Domain Game
“The dot-info domain will be a hit with e-marketers”
by Kathleen
CholewkaIn November, New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority, the organization
that runs the city’s sprawling subway system, traded in its complicated URL:
http://www.mta.nyc.ny.us for http://www.mta.info , and the site got a massive traffic
boost—it jumped from 200,000 hits a day to 3.5 million.
But that’s only one way
to use the new domain. Eager to put dot-coms and the associated bad economics
in the past, some marketers are coming up with even smarter uses for the new dot-info
suffix, using it to track the success of specific ads, or as a wireless portal to
their online channel. For example, when Subaru wanted to promote its new car
model, the WRX, it built a dot-info microsite, http://www.wrx.info, to help consumers
find out about the product easily (not to mention that the www.wrx.com address had
been taken by a radio station in 1995). Subaru’s other microsite, http://www.all-wheeldrive.info
provides detailed information on the drive system that Subaru uses in many of its
vehicles.
Roland LaPlante, chief marketing officer at Afilias, the consortium of
18 of the world’s leading registrars who own the dot-info name, suggests companies
consider spurring mobile commerce by using a dot-info site to attract wireless users
to their web content. “Our studies have shown that Internet users actually
prefer dot-info to dot-com” La Plante says. So far Laplante claims that nearly
70 percent of the world’s most valuable brands have already registered a dot-info
domain.
______another article which was directly below the one above________
Sales
and Marketing Management Magazine, February 2002 issue
Maximize on a microsite
“Use
a mini-web site to track your marketing impact”
written by K.C (Kathleen Cholewka)
For
Web-based promotions, instead of making changes to your already complicated corporate
dot-com Web site, which can be a headache for you and for the IT department, Afilias
recommends that marketers use a dot-info Web address as a microsite, or a Web page
created specifically to track a particular promotion. Just like mail stops
on a direct mailer, microsites can enable marketers to see exactly which visitors
respond online to specific campaigns and when. In addition, the sites can be
set up to notify marketers when respondents log onto the site. “Microsites
are good to use for tracking purposes”, says Mischelle Davis, director of North American
Marketing at New World Commerce, a marketing firm in Bellevue, Washington, which
sells a software template for building microsites. “You can send out a direct
mailer with the special URL listed, and then find out how many people went to the
page in response to it,” she says. “And once they’ve visited the site, you can track
what they do there.