Domains & Company Names. WelcomeMat mini case study

I would not recommend naming a company something if you cannot secure the domain.

Frank Schilling (top-shelf blog btw) owns a pretty good domain with welcomemat.com. It so happens that he is also getting some free links to that domain (http://www.vflyerblog.com/blog/2007/05/08/real-estate-20/) because someone didn’t take the time to notice that WelcomeMat TM- the new mover direct marketing company - actually is located at welcomematservices.com and not welcomemat.com (Frank’s domain).

• This is a big deal.

It happens all the time. Usually it happens by people looking for a specific site via direct navigation, but a link in a post just shows how much everyone - including bloggers and others who write about your company - expect you to own the domain equivalent of your business name.

Even scarier: what happens if Welcome Mat TM decides to do radio, tv, print, or even direct mail? Are people going to remember welcomematservices vs welcomemat? No. Instead Frank gets more traffic to buy himself another boat down in the Caymens.

The WelcomeMat name creates a good visual and I can see how a brainstorming session led them here, but the actual generic word doesn’t exactly convey the business value proposition, they were unable to get the obvious domain, and are probably losing business as seen in the wrong link in that post. And god forbid they get really big and then decide they want the domain…

Rule of thumb - if you have to add +services, +group, +inc, +company, or any other super generic modifier theat is not your company nam, then consider going back to the brainstorming for a new direction. Find something that you can buy the domain for (welcometotheneighbordhood? welcomingmat? welcome?).  Or else consider including the generic as part of your company (mywelcomemat, thewelcomemat) and use that in your logo, collatoral, everything & all the time because you’ll have to brand it yourself.

Key point here is; WelcomeMat TM doesn’t use “services” everywhere, and that vastly devalues their chosen domain.

WelcomeMat does look like a pretty cool company with a valuable service. However…I wouldn’t buy marketing services from a marketing company who failed one of my (admittedly unjustly unfair) key marketing tests: the company name & domain name.

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This is an old post that was private that I decided to make public:

I was doing some domain speculating this weekend & kept running across Marchex sites everywhere. Then I read an article over at dnjournal that talks about Marchex and their $164M investment into direct navigation (domains). So I figured I’d get my hands dirty and see what they really had behind all those numbers. It kind of shocked me…

Read the rest of this entry »

20.com was the big domain sold last week - for $75k. I wanted to see who the new owner was and what they were using it for, so I checked the whois to find that Jason Calcanis was the new proud papa of 20.com.

I didn’t realize he was a domainer and couldn’t figure out what he wants it for. Maybe it’ll be for the 20 “preditors” he’s poaching.

I haven’t seen anybody mention it - not that it’s a big deal or anything - but interesting nonetheless. I’m going to be poking around their setup and see if I can find any others to see what he’s up to.

There are many reasons - I was going to say legitimate and not, but I think it’s actually all “not” - for a site owner to try to hide which sites he/she owns and operates. When doing your due diligence on the competition, these sites are exactly the types of things you want to uncover. So here is a task list to figure out if those two sites that you are slightly suspicious of are a little too closely related:

1. Check the whois
domaintools.com/domaininquestion.com will quickly tell you if the site owners were complacent enough to just use the same registrant info or same name servers. Sometimes it will be the same DNS privacy company which is a hint in itself. I’ll do another post some other time on how to figure out who it is if the DNS is obfuscated. Read the rest of this entry »