Meet.ME Proves It’s About Vision
As I sit here in the Newark airport tonight exhausted from a busy week and knowing I have a long travel night ahead due to delays I wanted to at least put a few words out about the GREAT transaction that Michael Berkens, Ammar Kubba, and Rick Schwartz had with Meet.Me.
Since the launch of .ME was announced a few years back I could see the potential for this to be a domain extension with legs, even though .COM was the default there is always room for a disruptor to come around. By no means am I saying .ME is unseating .COM but if you keep up with the list of new company launches on TechCrunch.com it would be hard to argue that .ME is not holding its own as far as brandable names go.
If you have not read the news, check out the post on TheDomains.com about the $450,000 sell of Meet.me after an investment of just under $6,000 a few years back. As Mike Berkens put it in a comment on the post, and I paraphrase, thats a better return than the stock market these days.
This name is quite possibly the perfect .ME. In both the generic sense (i.e. come MEET me) and in a more product based sense. I have worked in the communications industry since 1996, and on a daily basis I have either been on or pitched features to telecommunication companies based on Meet Me Conferencing. So it makes complete sense that a conferencing company would by this perfect domain name for the industry.
Ammar Kubba, one of the owners of the name, had this to say:
I've always been an advocate of "brand" domains, more focused on the branding and marketing potential rather than the type-in traffic. Meet.me is perfect example... a global brand in the making. The buyer already owned meetme.com, yet they saw the power and potential of the shorter and more intuitive meet.me brand. .COM is (and most likely will continue to be) king, but there's still plenty of opportunity in alternative TLDs, if you can be creative, entrepreneurial and patient.
As someone who has put quite of bit of investment in some quality .ME domains names both personally and within LocalTek.com I am happy to see that .ME awareness continues to grow.
Also, once again, congrats to Natasa and Predrag from Domain.Me by association. All people involved in this deal from the domain industry are top notch and good people. Nice to see this happen to good people.
FBYou.net Misses the Mark with Domain Name
I have not blogged about domain names much lately but to my domainer friends, do not worry, my heads still int he game. Tonight I witnessed a domain fail that was worth blogging about.
Typically I fall on the side of the business owner when people complain about bad domain name selections, most small business owners do not have a marketing team or have not been educated on what constitutes a good or bad domain name, as an industry we have not educated the market as much as we would like to think we have. That said, many small businesses, especially in this market, do not have the budget.
But in this case, we are talking about a "business" with a significant budget and a real marketing budget that totally misses the mark when it comes to their marketing effort.
The marketing pitch they are giving talks about everything revolving around "YOU" as an individual. A quick search of YouTube shows several customers recorded which means that there has been real budget put behind this project.
Now, to my complaint, as everyone well knows that has followed me in the domain name industry, I am a believer in being able to develop extensions if you take the time to brand and market and search optimize properly. In many cases, based on a limited budget when first launching a project most startups cannot afford the high cost of entry for quality .COM domain names that we all love.
Well, Fontbonne is not a small startup, they are a well established college with a solid reputation. For reference their main website is Fontbonne.edu
Oh wait a second, if you type in FBYou.net guess where it goes, yep you got it, Fontbonne.edu.
And it goes there with no special content based on coming from the domain name advertised in the commercial (although I would hope they are at least tracking how much traffic is coming from the commercial efforts this way).
The problem I have with all of this is that the .COM is a parked domain on Bodis.com, the domain owner looks to be in China. I would expect there is little to no type-in traffic to FBYou.com that occurs when these commercials are not running. I would be extremely surprised if Fontbonne tried to actually acquire this domain. I would make a pretty solid assumption that their marketing team went with what they could hand register rather than paying what would be I would assume a pretty nominal cost to acquire the .COM.
For an effort like this, with a real budget behind it, there is no excuse for a real marketing team to not make the right decision and either A) pick a better domain or B) acquire the .COM.
So now, I would bet a good portion of type-in traffic is going to that parked page instead of to the Fontbonne.edu main page, in reality in this case they would of been completely better off just using the Fontbonne.edu domain as it is easier to remember and likely well known to those that have been researching schools in the area anyway.
I will give a small business owner the benefit of the doubt on domain name selection, but someone that is educating people on business and marketing and how it works in the real world needs to make better decisions.
Road Ragers Learn They Messed With Wrong Cyclist
As many peo
ple that read my blog know I am an avid cyclist. I have been on the bike for years and obey the laws and in general give much more leeway to vehicles than required by law out of courtesy since many drivers do not understand that cyclists have just as much right as they do to be on the road.
So, that said, for many years I have dealt with people driving by in their rusted out pick up trucks making comments while they try to fit behind their steering wheels drinking their 44 oz Big Gulp. Its the typical, not so original comments that they give, always the same, "nice spandex shorts" or "go Lance Armstrong", then a finger usually pops up (pretty sure that one finger is how far they can count, also if you take offense to the above then you are not realizing I take more offense based on what happened below). I, being me, always mouth back, and until tonight they always kept going.
Well, tonight that all changed. After finishing my fastest ride in a long time (2o MPH average on a hilly 21 mile route) we were coming back through town when a white mid-size car came up along side us, to be REAL CLEAR, myself and the rider with me were on the side of the road and not impeding traffic. The wife, in all her wisdom, decides to show the finger she can count to one with and starts mouthing obscene comments. I did the same and showed her I could count to one as well. She had also made some pretty bad comments that were so ridiculous a person could not take offense since they were so kindergarten.
At the stop sign, her husband decided to pull across and get out of the car and want to fight, I just rolled through slowly and said whatever and rolled on. I am 37, almost 38 year old man who does not live on an elementary playground, that said, I am big enough and fit enough to hold my own and was more than prepared to do what is necessary to make sure he realized that he picked the wrong person on the wrong day.
About a half mile up the road the car pulled up and parked, the person decided to park on the shoulder and then they blocked traffic and came after us, not being one to ever runaway, I stopped, unclipped from my bike, as he came up, he was mouthing along with his wife. I won't go into all the details of the mouthing, but I will admit I was giving right back. But the most important part is the guy actually was threatening violence and took a swing at me, I grabbed his wrist since it was not a full power swing. And we kept arguing.
Well, knowing that this needs to be fixed, I got their license plate number, called the police, and filed a report, since I had an actual witness, he also filed a witness report.
Locally cycling has grown and most of the leaders in the community are active cyclists, they understand that there needs to be education. I was happy to have one of them call me tonight about this incident after hearing about it. Kudos to the community leaders for being active in making sure we have a safe environment to ride in. It is people like the angry people tonight that are at fault, not us cyclists.
It looks like there is a good chance the story will go in the local newspaper and it will be mentioned with the license plate number of the couple in my twice a month radio show. It was also posted on Hicktown.com, here is the link: Watch Where You are Going $%$%$
For the record, they have a Missouri license plate, it is PJ5 K4Y , for those other cyclists, note it and watch out for them, this is a public service:)
Also, for the record, I was once 244lbs, its tattooed on my wrist, so I understand what its like to be that guy with the 44 oz Big Gulp....
About.me Acquired By AOL
A quick post, Techcrunch is reporting that About.me has been acquired by AOL in what is a big coup for .ME supporters and obviously a big win for the founders of the company. It is estimated the company received 425K in investment (partially from AOL Ventures) in their initial funding round. Acquisition price of the company has not been released but is said to be in the 10s of millions.
Last week I had written about the About.me site and as a .ME domain investor and developer I was happy to see such a perfect use for the extension in a way that showed the potential of using .ME as a brand.
About.me just launched in this past week after 400,000 sign ups for their beta. They provide a great personal profile service, mine is simple and not yet completely customized, you can see it at About.me/bmarler.
I see it as a great way to consolidate my social media profiles and bio into one location, the example I gave in my previous post is that I can now give one address on my business card so people can find the rest of my social networking info.
Congrats to the team at About.me and the .ME registry (Natasa and Predrag).
Also, Elliot did a nice write up on this acquisition as well.
I’m Still Alive!
Just read some comments over at MorganLinton.com asking where I had been and what was going on with myself and where I had went too. I use to post once or twice a day and I think my last post was in April so I can understand why people would be asking. I have been talking to many of my domain investor friends by phone and email in the background and they know what has been up but after reading the comments on Morgans site I thought I better put an update post out.
Well, I am still here. I just have not been blogging the past couple months based on a focused effort on getting our new staff up and moving and many things that been going on for our localsearch and online advertising business at Localtek. My blog posts would be lacking in quality if I had been posting the past few months so rather than put out daily posts that were not of quality I thought it better to not blog for a few months while getting people ramped up and moving.
At the same time I started focusing on getting myself back to the level of fitness I was at previous to starting the business. Previously I had been doing marathons, triathlons and other endurance events. After starting Localtek I changed drastically and had set a date directly after the Domainer Mardi Gras festivities to get myself back in shape.
We have had many great things happening for the company, we have our own radio show now (every other Wednesday on KREI 800 AM in the area I am in) and also have started to have articles in print media even. A local magazine (one of the few stable areas of print media is localized magazines) has started putting articles in monthly. We have been fortunate to have companies that would normally consider us competitors to realize that we can all work together to help each other.
Also, we recently moved offices, we are now at 119 E Columbia in Farmington, MO. The new space is over double what we had and is quite amazing actually and is in walking distance to my favorite coffee shop and restaurant (to anyone that is my friend on Facebook you would know those as 12 West or Bauhaus Kaffee).
As far as the fitness has went I have lost 42 lbs and have completed a triathlon and some running events since getting back into it and have another triathlon planned for July 18th. Anyone that knew me before starting Localtek knows how important biking and running and staying active is to me. It is nice to be back at it.
This week alone we have 5 seminars we are giving to local businesses, 4 in Kentucky which will be recorded and played on a local TV station as an actual show and then one in the local area we are at during a Chamber of Commerce meeting. These seminars really help to educate the masses on the importance of using technology to help their business now that the yellow pages and other legacy methods of business promotion are faltering while online becomes more important than ever.
Luckily the team that we have now has ramped up quite fast and I expect to be back to regular posting with even more info than before soon.
GeoDomain Expo Agenda Details Coming In
As the date nears for next weeks GeoDomain expo the agenda continues to firm up and it is looking to be a good one. If you have any interest in developing your Geo domains into money making properties this show should help you along the way.
You can see the agenda here: GeoDomain expo agenda.
I look forward to being on the panel concerning developing any size city, large or small. With our development of Missouri.me we have worked hard to determine how best to monetize and develop everything from 1000 person community websites to city portals.
Looking at the agenda this is a conference that should really help companies looking to learn how to best market and grow their properties, as our geo properties grow in importance based on the failure of print media and the continued move of eyeballs to online media rather than print it is more important than ever for people to learn the best way to take advantage of this.
Also, an interesting addition to the agenda is that of Chef Patrick now of Oversee.net, this will be Patrick's first panel since joining Oversee. Nice to see him on the circuit:)
And yes, this expo is being held during Jazz Fest which means great entertainment and events surrounding the great opportunity to learn how to grow your business. Make sure you look at the agenda linked to above.
Me.Me Acquired By Yahoo
Great news for marketing folks that understand the value of the .ME brand, as is being reported on a few other domain blogs such as TheDomains.com and ElliotsBlog.com Yahoo has acquired me.me from the .ME registry. Sedo brokered the transaction between the two entities.
This is great news for the .ME extension as it shows continued awareness by major internet companies of the extension and its potential for branding and memorability.
Other major companies that began using .ME in various ways are Facebook with FB.me and Wordpress with WP.me.
I want to extend a big congrats to Natasa and Predrag from the .ME team, I know how hard they work to promote their brand and love to see when great things happen to good people.
Our Own Radio Show And Growing Momentum
People like to say "Isn't it great when a plan comes together?", well in the past few weeks every time I feel like the momentum has hit a peak I continue to be proved wrong. Sometimes that really is not a bad thing.
Since we started bringing on more resources and starting making plans for the next set of hires we have really started to see what happens when we implement the plans we have laid out to investors (and to ourselves for that matter).
In the beginning of the Localtek and Missouri.me launch we had worked towards bringing on specific types of partners that could help us launch into regions where we currently did not have a presence. That plan is taking shape and after our seminars in Dexter, MO we have a new telecommunications partner who has 118,000 subscribers and multiple states where they are located. They are already planning additional seminars to help us push our services out to their business customers.
What is best about this partner is they started working with us based not on us approaching them but on the recommendation from current customers and partners. As a company that just launched last year we are very happy to have partners such as this coming on board and supporting us in our growth plans.
In another surprising but VERY exciting partnership we have starting working with a key regional player in the radio space. We are working with this group of stations to both increase their social media and search presence. It is very nice to see a company that would typically be considered a competitor to someone helping businesses be found online rather than offline work with us to prove out the holistic marketing plan we speak of. They really do get the need to tie their voice on the airwaves to their online presence and social media presence as well.
After much discussion it was decided that I will also have a voice on the airwaves, we will have 2 technology and online marketing tip spots daily along with 2 separate radio shows focused on the same subjects, this is all on different stations so we get a large market presence in a very key area of Missouri.
Very exciting and something I really look forward too. We will have the ability to replay the shows to I expect to have links to them on the blog here as they play. For our company this is really a great thing.
In other exciting news we have started working closely with the city we want to move to and have been spending quite a bit of time exploring new office space and also spaces that may built from scratch to suit our needs. The community we are moving to has been a big supporter of ours and due to this we want to move from the current city we are in and into a city that really understands how to support local business.
On that note the city we are moving too has even sponsored one of our largest seminars to date that will be given May 5th at their city hall. When a fast growing, very progressive community supports you and helps promote you to their businesses that is as good of a vote of confidence as you can get.
Now, on a personal note since I had so many emails after putting this in last time, I should be down 30 pounds by this time tomorrow, I started back on my old healthy lifestyle the day after Domainer Mardi Gras ended (Feb 15th). More than halfway there!
Working With Local City Officials To Increase Brand Awareness
One of the great things about the seminar plan that we have used here at Localtek and Missouri.me is that it allows us to get direct reaction from customers, consumers, and local government officials. This can really work to your benefit if you are developing a geo domain as a vote of confidence from local government officials can really strengthen your companies standing in a community.
I have noticed that across the state of Missouri links from local libraries, city websites, etc have increased as we have went on even without our requesting, that is great news and I expect to see it continue as we start phase 2 of feature development for the site.
Well, we have taken it one step further with one of the most progressive business communities in the state which is Farmington, MO. The area is growing fast and has continued to do well even in the down economy. We were fortunate to have the economic development director attend one of our seminars last year and he could immediately see the value of the education received from the seminar could be of real value to the businesses in the community.
One thing he could see, as well as many others, is that many business owners knew they needed to care about being online, needed to care about things like Facebook, but most did not even know where to start or had seen a good example of use. Our seminar had shown that, after speaking to him we decided to work together to put together another seminar in the area promoted by the city and to be given at city hall.
Well, this week it was confirmed and an email went out to all subscribers of the city newsletter. I think this s a great example of what having real feet on the street people to promote your online services can do. Education is key, I tell people all the time as much as I want them to buy from us at the end of the day the more people that are educated on how marketing is changing the more we all benefit long term. You can only educate if you are out there with the business owners and city officials.
And also, for those that think online marketing is just about advertising online, our seminar shows it is not. There is a holistic plan you must use to market online, things are changing everyday as people use their mobile phones and social networks to get the info they need.
So, I wanted to say thanks to the city of Farmington for their support of what we are doing.
We have some other very interesting joint promotion concepts that we will be announcing soon as well. Lets just say sometimes your competition can actually be your best friend....
Localtek Hires As Legacy Media Declines
March 26, 2010, Desloge, MO - LocalTek, LLC, an innovator in local search and advertising solutions for businesses across America, announces plans to aggressively hire more sales staff and web developers to meet the growing needs of their rapidly expanding client list.
Traditional legacy media has come under fire during these difficult economic times with massive layoffs and corporate downsizing. With a consistently shrinking market share, newspapers and other forms of print media are closing their doors and causing their unemployed workers to seek jobs in an increasingly smaller job market. LocalTek aims to hire these former legacy media employees to expand the company’s thriving online presence.
“We feel that people who have experience in selling media would be a terrific asset to our company,” said Bruce Marler, founder of LocalTek. “The unprecedented growth we’ve had has led to an immediate need to add more employees to our line up.”
The surge in local search has grown significantly over the past year and with the current economic downturn many people are looking to their own community for their needs and services. LocalTek has developed a strategic business plan catering to these needs and has provided their clients with websites that have substantially increased local traffic and customers to their client’s business.
LocalTek has discovered an economic solution in its business practice by reaching out to small businesses that were previously untapped by larger marketing companies. By providing cost-effective web development, local search & SEO, social media promotion, and targeted location based services that virtually any business can afford, LocalTek is providing a variety of small businesses the opportunity to compete competitively with the same resources used by large corporations.
LocalTek’s business model has met large success and the company has been featured in international news with its innovative community portal, Missouri.me, which serves over 1,000 communities in Missouri. Missouri.me offers visitors local information about news, businesses, weather, and classifieds in their community.
About LocalTek
LocalTek provides cost effective, locally targeted, online advertising, and website solutions for a variety of business types throughout the United States. LocalTek solutions are targeted at specific geographic areas, which allow businesses to focus on the customers they find most valuable.
Headquartered in Desloge, Missouri, LocalTek is rapidly expanding its service offering in over 20 markets nationwide. For additional information, please visit us at www.localtek.com.