Some of Alan's views on this digital marketing malarkey ... there's more on: AlanCharlesworth.com

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

poor verbal-domain-name practice

As readers of some of my other stuff [not least, domain names - a marketer's perspective] will already know, I have always considered the choice and use of domain names to be greatly under-valued.

In my writing on the subject I warn about careful consideration when communication domains in a verbal medium. This example comes from the radio. As with most [all?] counties and regions of the UK, County Durham is trying to generate income through tourism. Their radio ad featured all the expected promotional content then ended with a sentence that went 'for more information, visit County Durham online'.

As I once was involved in a project to develop 'virtual communities' based on the counties of the UK - and CountyDurham.com was one of the domains we had - this took my attention, and I went to that domain. sadly, I got a 'domain for sale' sign.

The problem? The web site being featured on the radio ad was actually visitcountydurham.com - but the inflection in the voice-over didn't make that clear. A simple change to something like 'go to our web site [pause]
visitcountydurham.com' or even say 'www' before the domain name [kind of redundant these days, but in this cases it might be worthwhile.

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