Bill Sweetman

Bill Sweetman is the General Manager, Domain Portfolio at Tucows.

Bill is one of the interactive marketing industry's most respected authorities, and his innovative work over the last 15+ years has been recognized by numerous awards, including the prestigious Internet World Impact Award for Communications.

As an interactive marketing specialist, Bill has overseen Internet marketing campaigns for companies such as Alliance Atlantis Communications, CBC, Dupont, Enbridge Gas Distribution, Harlequin Enterprises, Hewlett-Packard, Pfizer Canada, and RBC Royal Bank.

Bill is a regular contributor to various industry publications and Websites, a frequent speaker at industry conferences, and is regularly interviewed by the media as an interactive marketing expert. He is also one of the founders of The Canadian New Media Awards, and he has worked as a producer on numerous award-winning Websites.

A member of the Association for Internet Marketing and Sales (AIMS), Bill also serves on the Digital Marketing Conference Committee for the Canadian Marketing Association and the Centennial College e-Business Institute Advisory Council.

For a wealth of practical Internet marketing advice, tips, and best practices, be sure to check out Bill's popular Internet marketing blog, Sweetmantra.

Twitter IDs are the New Domain Names

It's 2009, so I would hope by now that any marketer reading this article online understands the importance of securing your company's brands as domain names. In other words, Acme Furniture should own and control the domain name acmefurniture.com (and, if it's a Canadian company, acmefurniture.ca as well) even if you don't yet have a Web site.

My question for you today is, "Have you done the same for Twitter?"

Twitter is a micro-blogging platform that is growing in popularity at an astonishing rate. The purpose of this article is not to explain or promote the benefits of Twitter; that topic has been covered by others: you can read all of the various articles about Twitter on the CMA blog here.

What I want you to understand today is that Twitter IDs (or "user names" or "handles") are the equivalent of domain names.

For instance, the Twitter ID for my personal brand, Bill Sweetman, is @billsweetman (which corresponds with the URL http://www.twitter.com/billsweetman) and for my corporate brand, YummyNames, it is @yummynames.

Even if you don't understand Twitter or don't think it has a role to play in your company's marketing efforts today, I strongly urge you to still secure your Twitter ID now.

In my case, I do all my Tweeting (as its called) as @billsweetman but I made sure that I registered all my other professional brands as Twitter IDs so that when and if I want to use Twitter for those other brands I already have the most intuitive Twitter ID.

I predict that over the next few years, millions of dollars will be spent by companies buying, selling, and fighting over Twitter IDs. I have already seen a number of nasty legal spats develop, and I have personally brokered the sale of several Twitter IDs already. And this is only the very beginning...

If you are Acme Furniture, you should make sure you get your hands on @acmefurniture right away. Since there is no fee to register a Twitter ID, you have no excuse not to do this. Simply head on over to http://www.twitter.com and sign up for a free account.

Don't be the person who in a year or two is having to explain to their company President why you didn't secure the company name as a Twitter ID. Take two minutes and do it today.

One final tip: Twitter will eventually suspend an account if it has not been used for six months, so make sure you post something once a month just to keep your account active and not risk losing your valuable Twitter ID.

Are You Your Best Client?

For an Internet marketer who is charged with the task of promoting their own product or service, one of the best things about being your own 'client' is that you don't have to spend a ton of time convincing The Client that there may actually be something to this newfangled Internet thingee. And the second best thing, in my opinion, is that you don't have to be secretive (to the public) about the tactics you are using, or the results. And the third thing is you can move really fast. And the fourth thing is...

OK, you get my point.

I recently found myself in the position of being my own client again. This time, however, The Client insisted I really embrace the notion of transparency. Henceforth, over at my blog I've started publishing what I am calling "My Internet Marketer's Diary" and the goal of it is to lift up the curtain and share some of the marketing tactics I am using to promote Hollywoozy, my newest online venture.

There's no point in me regurgitating the entire post here (not to mention the fact that I promised the CMA that I wouldn't do that), but what I can tell you is that the five key tactics I deployed can be summarized as follows:

1. Build the Site with Search Engines in Mind
2. Invite the Search Engines to Crawl the Website Prior to Launch
3. Use Tags to Define the Content of the Website
4. Generate Targeted Traffic via a Multiple Domain Name Strategy
5. Invite Some Enthusiasts to a Sneak Peek

While I consider these tactics some of the essential building blocks of a good online marketing campaign, I doubt I would have had the opportunity to execute all of them had I not been my own client. The realization of that hit me all of a sudden, and it got me thinking.

What kind of work do you do when you are your own client? And how do the results compare to the work you do for 'real' clients? The difference between the two, if there is one, is worth pondering...

Domain Name Disputes: Honey or Vinegar?

One of the more unusual aspects of my job as General Manager of a large private portfolio of domain names is that I see all the "poison pen" letters from lawyers representing clients who believe (usually incorrectly, I should add) they are legally entitled to a domain name that we own. Since we own over 150,000 domain names, we get quite a few of these letters every week!

I make sure that we respond to each and every one of these inquiries, and now that I've seen and dealt with over a hundred of these letters I wanted to make a suggestion to the marketing community at large:

"You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar."

Admittedly, I didn't come up with this age-old concept, but I'd like to remind people that you will have better luck resolving a dispute - any dispute - by playing nice than by being hostile.

For instance, the next time you think that someone owns a domain name that you think you are legally entitled to, don't make your first move a "nasty lawyer's letter."

Instead, just reach out to the current owner with a courteous phone call or email (which you can get from checking the public WHOIS records) and let them know you have some questions or concerns. You might discover that the current owner is a lot nicer than you think, is not a hardened criminal, and is more than willing to negotiate in good faith. You might even learn that the original basis for your complaint is flawed and that - surprise, surprise - you aren't legally entitled to the domain name after all.

Not only will you save yourself the time, hassle, and significant expense of going the legal route (fighting a domain name dispute can cost many thousands of dollars), but you will begin the dialogue on a positive and constructive basis, not an adversarial one.

I go out of my way to help the small minority of folks who approach me nicely and are willing to listen to and consider our side of the story. Between us, we can usually resolve the situation within a few days. Unfortunately, I can count these "honey" folks on the fingers of one hand.

I'm not so sympathetic towards the "vinegar" folks - those who courier me three-inch thick stacks of legal documents that make all sorts of false accusations, ridiculous demands, and set unrealistic timelines for a response. (One company did this to me, quite deliberately, on Christmas Eve last year.) Sadly, these "poison pen" letters make up the vast majority of inquiries I receive. Sure, we respond to them as well, but I'm not going to cut them any slack or do them any favours. Why should I?

In the end, this boils down to one simple suggestion: be nice. ;+)

A New Year's Resolution That's Easy to Keep

I'd like to suggest a New Year's resolution to you:

Don't "lose" your domain name.

What am I talking about? Well, every day my colleagues at Tucows deal with business owners who are in a panic because they "lost" their all-important domain names. And by "lost" this (upon further investigation) usually means the business owners forgot to renew their domain name on time.

Now, I'm sympathetic to a point, however the responsibility for renewing a domain name ultimately rests with the owner of the domain name and no one else.

Sometimes, I'm proud to say, we can help reinstate the "lost" domain name. And sometimes we simply can't. Which, for some businesses, is a disaster. Yet it's a disaster that could have been so easily avoided.

Here's how:

Take 30 seconds, RIGHT NOW, to find out when your domain name is going to expire. (Do a WHOIS query at whois.tucows.com, then check to see what expiration/renewal date is listed.) Make note of this date.

Now, take another 30 seconds to write a reminder to yourself to renew the domain name a few weeks before it expires. Go ahead, I'll wait while you do this. Use Outlook or whatever calendaring system you use. Just make sure you set a reminder!

Finally, when you get your reminder to renew your domain name, RENEW your darn domain name! In most cases this takes less than two minutes, and you can do it online via the company your registered the domain name with.

See, that wasn't too difficult, was it? Especially compared to how difficult "losing" your domain name would be...

Happy New Year!

When Does Innovation Become Irritation?

On a recent flight to the United States, I came across a quintessential example of what I believe is wrong with the traditional advertising industry.

Sitting in my seat on a US Airways flight bound for Savannah, I decide to unlock the table tray in order to have a place to rest my papers on.

This is what I was greeted with:

That's right, the surface of the table tray was completely covered by a vinyl clingy ad for an electronic manufacturer's noise canceling headphones.

Now, I've worked with enough media planners to appreciate the strategic thinking that probably went into this in terms of demographic targeting. And from an advertiser's perspective I can totally appreciate the evil genius of the whole 'captive audience' mentality behind this media placement.

It's 2007, however, and should marketers really be trying to find 'virgin' surfaces to plaster yet another one of their ads upon? Is this really innovation? Is this something the industry should be proud of?

And check out the ad copy itself:

The ultimate irony, in my mind, is the ad copy's claim that the headphones "dramatically reduce unwanted sounds." It's too bad that in promoting this feature the advertiser may have dramatically increased the level of visual pollution.