Bill Rice's blog

Comments

I’m sure you have secured the relevant domain name for your company. In fact, considering the competitive state of the domain market, you probably named your company based on domain availability.

Now the gut wrenching question: Are you thinking about other critical namespaces?

The popularity and search indexing of social media namespaces could once again put your brands, products, and executives’ reputations at risk. If you have not considered social media namespaces in your strategic plan—stop and complete this checklist:

1. List critical brands and keywords identifiable with your company

Company name
Subsidiaries or affiliates
Unique property or locations
Executive officers and notable managers
Products, services, and brands

2. Acquire namespaces with significant market presence

Facebook
Twitter
YouTube
Flickr
Others that might make sense
- Delicious
- Slideshare.net

Why? Here’s the simple social media namespace business case:

Facebook is the number two destination on the Internet and the top referrer of Internet traffic. Twitter is the top syndication and distribution service on the Internet—highly trusted by consumers. YouTube is the number two search engine, behind Google and ahead of Yahoo! and Bing. Flickr seems to be emerging as the low-cost photo-journalist of online news—even the traditional media outlets. Oh, and it’s free (until you are trying to battle a name-squatter).

Best Advice on Name Squatting—Be there first!

Name-squatter resources:

Comments

That’s right. We are getting rid of all the jobs at Kaleidico.

(Dramatic pause)

Now that we have given all our competitors a little time to do a goofy little victory dance—let me explain.

I have long been a fan of Seth Godin’s thinking, but as I read and reviewed Linchpin I knew I needed to go beyond being a fan and inject this thinking into my company, Kaleidico.

I have constantly preached it, forwarded his posts internally, given away his book to my employees, but this post—Everyone’s model of work is a job—got me up out of my chair to do something radical.

This is what I did. This morning I announced a contest to rout out the “jobs” and people that love their “job” at Kaleidico. We’re calling it the Entrepreneur of the Month contest and trying to closely simulate/emulate that ethos.

Here are the details:

Invent and “ship” a product (it can, but doesn't have to, relate to any existing Kaleidico product or service)
Create it and launch it to a unique Kaleidico.com URL (labs or blog)
Promotion is all on you. However, you can use any Kaleidico branded site (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) or friends and family.
Projects must be published to Kaleidico.com URL by 3/12
Web traffic, as measured by Google Analytics, will be the measurement to determine the "Entrepreneur of the Month"
The period of Web traffic measurement will be between 3/12-3/26
The winner will get a significant bonus in March
Like a "real" entrepreneur you have to get your "day job" done (maybe a little more efficiently) so you can make time to create your new idea and reach "escape velocity."