By: James Koole on November 8th, 2007
Posted in: Reseller Resources
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Bill Sweetman, Tucows General Manager, Domain Portfolio is out in Vancouver this week for a marketing conference known as “DM Day.” The DM stands for direct marketing, and the conference is presented by the British Columbia Association of Internet Marketers. Bill was asked to talk domains and gave a well-received presentation titled, “Domain Name Karate: The ‘ancient’ art of maximizing and defending your domain names.”

Warren Frey of Techvibes was there and gives a nice summary of Bill’s talk on the Techvibes blog. You can read about it here.

And while I’m on the topic of Bill and domain names, our man Sweetman was down at Traffic in Miami a few weeks back and talked to a few of the movers and shakers in the domain industry. You can listen to those interviews by way of his podcast series, “Marketing Martini.” Not surprisingly, those can be found at http://www.marketingmartini.com/. So far Bill’s posted chats with Monte Cahn, founder and CEO of Moniker, Phil Corwin, legal counsel to the Internet Commerce Association and Peter Lamson of NameMedia.

You can listen right on the website, or subscribe to Bill’s podcast series in iTunes via this link.

By: Ross Rader on November 5th, 2007
Posted in: Events
Tags: ICANN
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Most people would jump on the opportunity to spend 10 days in Los Angeles. Sun, surf and stars – it doesn’t get any better.

Of course, most people aren’t involved in ICANN. 10 days with no sunlight and all of our surfing was done on the web.

A typical ICANN meeting starts out with the pre-meeting activity. This time, I flew down a couple of days ahead of the pre-meetings for some pre-pre-meetings to make sure that the pre-meetings went smoothly. Confused yet? Me too and I’ve been doing this for eight years.

The big item on the agenda this past week was the issue of Whois. The problem that we face is that ICANN’s requirement to publish personal contact information on the web via Whois contradicts privacy laws in many countries. We’ve been actively involved in trying to find a compromise between the anti-privacy crowd who wants to continue with Whois in its current form regardless of what the law says and the pro-privacy folks on the other hand that are looking for exemptions that would allow regular people to opt-out of having their data publicly accessible. Not all of their data, just their phone number and email addresses.

The anti-privacy folks (mostly the same people that brought you the RIAA and other over-zealous intellectual property organizations) don’t like this approach because they believe that this will make it easier for normal folks to infringe on their intellectual property rights. I won’t go into the details of their arguments, but suffice to say that there is very little in the way of “intellect” in their opposition.

I personally spent four days in various back-room meetings trying to negotiate a compromise that would work for everyone. At one point, I had an explicit agreement from the intellectual property representatives, but when the chips hit the table, they “forgot” that we had made a deal. Serves me right, I should have had them sign something. Never do a handshake deal with a lawyer from Hollywood.

I won’t go into all of the gory details around Whois, there are a bazillion press reports on the subject. Dvorak called me “stupid”, elsewhere I was referred to as “emotional” and that I was “overreacting”. Very few of the reports actually got the details of the story right – most of them were heavily influenced by the highly-organized lobby against our compromises. Never underestimate the capabilities of a ticked off intellectual property lawyer.

Nick Jesdanun and Burke Hansen wrote my two favorite stories, although what Burke thought was an attempt at a protest was actually an aborted attempt to sneak out to the washroom.

The next big issues on the ICANN policy agenda relate to domain tasting and “front-running”. There will also be some additional work in the area of domain transfers. We will continue to take a leadership role on these issues as we have on other ICANN issues in the past. It is an important organization that makes important decisions related to the future of the internet and we believe it is critical for us to make sure that we look out for the interests of our business and those of our resellers in this forum.

This meeting also marked the end of Vint Cerf’s term as Chairman of the Board. At a gala event at Sony Studios, everyone from Al Gore to Darth Vader participated in sending Vint off in style with the kind of words and more than just a touch of Hollywood flourish.

Vint will be replaced with Peter Dengate-Thrush, a long time ICANN participant with roots in the ccTLD community. Tucows completely supports Peter and we strongly believe that he will have a positive effect on ICANN and its future direction. It is definitely worth noting that Peter was one of the few ICANN directors that voted against allowing Verisign the unchecked capability to increase domain name registration prices.

The next ICANN meeting will be held in New Delhi this coming February. Tucows will of course be there – our 28th consecutive meeting. Whew!

(photo’s by AP and Joi Ito)

By: OpenSRS Team on October 18th, 2007
Posted in: Events
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ISPCON day two had a diverse lineup in the business track of its conference: after analyzing decision making processes and hiring procedures, the day ended with Guerrilla Marketing for Service Providers, led by Larry Loebig, director of the Guerrilla Marketing Association.

Larry had everyone in the room thinking twice about their current marketing plans by the end of his session. He reminded us that “marketing is everything we do to communicate about our service, products or business.” He focused on the objectives of marketing – prospecting, raising awareness – and bucking the traditional plans of putting together some advertising, sending out a direct mail shot and waiting for the phone to ring. Larry explained the need to use a broad mix of guerrilla marketing tools if you want to cut through the noise of the other 2,999 marketing messages the average consumer is hit with in a day and make yourself stand out.

A proper marketing mix hinges on first identifying your company’s differential advantage:

• What makes you different
• How do you stand out from the herd
• Mindshare – how you capture and retain the attention of your customers
• WIFM (“What’s In It For Me?”)
• Core Story – the essence of what you can offer your customer that they can’t get anywhere else

Guerrilla marketing is about process, not events. It’s based on psychology, not guessing. You need to invest time, energy, imagination and knowledge to craft a sustainable way to communicate your message. Guerrilla marketing offers up to 200 weapons (everything from marketing plans to logos to community involvement) that companies can use to maximize message delivery and retention. Speaking of marketing plans, here are the core questions Larry recommends every seven-step marketing plan cover:

• What is the purpose of your marketing?
• How will you achieve your purpose?
• Who is your target audience and what do you want them to do?
• What marketing weapons will you use?
• What is your niche in the marketplace and what are your differential advantages?
• What is your identity?
• What your marketing budget as a percentage of projected gross sales?

By: OpenSRS Team on October 17th, 2007
Posted in: Events
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My first day of the ISPCON conference ended back in the area of hosting, at a session called Strategies for Growing Your Hosted Business. It was co-presented by Ravi Agarwal, CEO of groupSPARK and Rich Bader, president and CEO of EasyStreet Online Services.

Both Ravi and Rich shared insight into the evolution of their businesses, giving hints about what helped them along the way. Rich promoted the outsourcing of services – like email – to partners to help efficiently provide services to a growing customer base. He also talked about maintaining a presence in the business community (EasyStreet does it through their business blogger and event sponsorships), to stay connected to the group of people that helped propel the company’s growth in its infancy.

Ravi spoke about the growing market of SaaS (Software as a Service) applications and how they will continue to broaden the opportunities in the world of Web 2.0. He also spoke about the benefits of exchange hosting and enterprise messaging:

• Exchange Hosting:
  • Anywhere access to full Outlook data
  • Collaboration accomplishes more
  • Gives peace of mind
  • Better ROI than on-premise management

• Enterprise Messaging
  • Growing suite of apps
  • Add $20/user/month of new revenue
  • Start selling fast

By: OpenSRS Team on October 17th, 2007
Posted in: Events
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Mid-morning brought an inspirational business session titled Choosing to be Great Instead of Big, led by Layne Sisk, president of The Plus Group. His talk was about focusing your efforts on satisfying key groups of people rather than appealing to mass audiences. Layne used five ways to be “great” to illustrate his point:

• Great in your customers eyes
  • Not just in customer service, be great from their perspective
  • Make the relationship personal
  • Make your customers a branch of your marketing department

• Great in quality
  • If you don’t believe in quality, you’ll never produce it
  • Get customer feedback to gauge quality levels

• Great in community
  • Participate in/set up community involvement programs
  • Get involved in what you truly care about

• Great place to work
  • Promote a culture of intimacy
  • Make pay a secondary reason for people to work for you

• Great for you
  • Make your business something you love; it becomes like your second family