Registrar Connections

As 2007 winds down, the Naming Services team is working on plans for 2008 which will focus on growing our core domain name business, enhancing products offerings and expanding our channel in underserved regions of the world. To support these plans, Raynor Dahlquist has assumed the position of Senior Vice President and will oversee the Naming Services business unit. At the same time, Naming Services says farewell to Mark McLaughlin who has decided to pursue other interests and Mark Shull who will manage other VeriSign business units.

We eagerly anticipate 2008 but before we close out 2007, we would like to wish you all, Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year!

Did you Miss Out on Important Updates?

(Customer Compliance Reminder: Please share this article with your key employees.)

Our readers have told us that they appreciate reading our articles, most especially State of the Domain Name Industry (Nov., Aug., May), Usability Tips: Multi-layered Help (Oct.), Influencing Key Audiences (Jul.), Registrar Checklist (Apr.), and Don’t Get Hacked (Sept.), to name a few. Many registrars signed up when we announced our first-ever VeriSign Registrar Overview and Training Camp and our Webinar series. And there was great readership interest when we published a special eMarketer technology report on Western Europe Internet and Getting Through To Customers.

As a long-time subscriber to Registrar Connections, you may have seen the articles mentioned above and maybe even forwarded them to your colleagues. When you do share these articles with your colleagues, please remind them that they can become a subscriber too. Simply forward the e-newsletter to them and tell them to click on the “Sign Up” box.

However, more important is making sure that you update your company contacts at the VeriSign Registry. All .com and .net ICANN accredited registrars are required to update their company Points of Contact with the VeriSign Registry whenever there are any staff changes affecting the listing. Specifically, those contacts are:

Updating your contact information is critical, yet quick and easy to do. You can update it using the NameStore Manager Tool or by contacting Customer Service at info@verisign-grs.com or +1 703 925 6999. In order to access the Name Store Manager Tool, you will need your username and password. Please note, before any changes can be made by our Customer Service team, you must provide your company’s security phrase.

Make sure your company never misses out on important notices about new products and services, maintenance alerts, new marketing programs, upcoming registrar events and more. Please ensure that your company’s list of key contacts is correct and accurate.

.JOBS: New Development

New development: Registrars are now able to send fully qualified applicant information for .JOBS registrations through the Name Store. Information that is used to validate a new registration, such as the registrant company name, billing address, e-mail address, and phone number, can all be sent via EPP on the Name Store platform.

Functionality for the qualified applicant information is implemented in both the OTE and Production environments on the Name Store. You can find the latest SDK on our Web site. For more information, you may also reference the .jobs Product Guidebook.

.JOBS provides job seekers direct navigation straight to the employment web site of an employer organization. To find out more about the .jobs TLD, contact Namingmarketing@verisign.com.

360 View: CIO Insight – 2007 Vendor Value Study

CIOs Rank VeriSign as One of the Leading High-Tech Vendors for Value
VeriSign Singled Out for Helping Companies Increase Revenues and Meet ROI Goals

Mountain View, CA – November 28, 2008 – IT executives have ranked VeriSign, Inc. (NASDAQ: VRSN), the leading provider of Internet infrastructure for the networked world, as one of the industry’s highest value vendors, according to CIO Insight’s recently published 2007 Vendor Value Study. VeriSign ranked number one in the security category and tied with Google and HP for second place, overall.

VeriSign was also ranked number one in two Value categories: “Meeting Expectations for Increasing Revenues” and “Meeting ROI Expectations.” (Read full press release)

Tips: Stellar Branded Video

Five Tips for Stellar Branded Video
iMedia Connection. By Julie Ruvolo, Advertising Sales and Strategy, DivX’s Stage6

If aliens descended on Madison Avenue in search of this thing called branded video, they would return to the mother ship with a single video in their tentacles: Dove Evolution. By Dove's impression, this video has been watched more times on YouTube than there are humans on the planet, or grains of sand on the beaches of Earth.

In the context of a landscape that is endlessly innovating, we need to look beyond a single viral-video-gone-wild as our guiding light. These days, branded video has no standard format, length or distribution strategy, which is why we call it "video" instead of "commercials," "film" or "trailers." And that's precisely the point, says Mark Naples, managing partner at WIT Strategy. "Video is so sexy because there are no rules about it, and everyone gets to write their own rules." (Source: http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/17696.asp)

News: Cyber Monday

Online consumers saw over 150 million instances of the VeriSign seal as they shopped on Cyber Monday, one of the busiest Internet shopping days of the year. The one-day total reached on Monday, Nov. 26, is an all-time record and represents a 50 percent increase over last year’s 100 million impression milestone.

The VeriSign Secured Seal, which includes the widely recognized “VeriSign check mark,” is a common fixture on Web pages of leading online merchants, financial services providers and other business. The seal indicates that the Web page is secured by VeriSign Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Certificates and is recognized worldwide as a symbol of trust and online security.

“As online shopping becomes an increasingly essential channel for retailers – not just during the holidays but every day of the year – merchants are under growing pressure to demonstrate that their Web sites are safe and secure… (Read full press release)

Staff Spotlight: Lenn Orentas

“I can spend hours tinkering with a car. It is very interesting and a lot of fun. There is no such thing as a bad car – only bad drivers. Keeping cars in great shape and humming way past their odometer’s limit to go beyond to 300,000 miles is very do-able. I’ve done it several times on different cars!”

Lenn Orentas is known around VeriSign for this same tinkering talent, dogged persistence and can-do attitude that he applies to our business metrics, data reports and analysis. When he was the project manager for the Naming business unit, you would always find Lenn poring over a sea of spreadsheets. He says it was interesting and “a lot of fun” to analyze the numbers from different angles and understand the factors that caused the final results. Now, Lenn has expanded his analytical passion to domain names and their associated Web Sites as the product manager of Internet Profile Service (IPS). This service provides deep-dive categorization and classification of the many, varied attributes of domain names and their associated Web sites.

November 2007 was Lenn’s ten-year anniversary with VeriSign and those years were all about “tinkering” with the business to keep it in great shape. He started as a manager for domain name dispute resolution during the time when ICANN was not yet in existence and eventually moved to the Customer Affairs team where he helped create the original registrar ramp-up process and the Registry Registrar Agreement compliance program. He was a key player on several key initiatives including VOIP and was also actively involved with new business development projects.

He has a lot of hobbies too aside from VeriSign and cars: with his wife and four children, Lenn likes to go skiing or vacationing at the beach; he is an active member of the Lithuanian-American community and was a president in their Washington, D.C. chapter.

Lenn explains, “It’s a rare privilege to be able to continue working with the same core people at VeriSign who have such strong work skills, extensive industry knowledge, and a powerful passion to manage the business well for our customers and keep the company growing!”

Special Data Charts from eMarketer: Europe, Asia, North America

Top 10 Most Popular Online Activities of Internet Users in Select Countries in Europe

Social Networking Activities of Internet Users in Select Countries in the Asia-Pacific Region, Q1 2007 (% of respondents)

To read the full reports associated with these charts, please contact Jennifer Moore at 212-763-6046 or send an email to jmoore@emarketer.com.

Special Technology Report from eMarketer: Social Network Marketing

Social Network Marketing: Ad Spending and Usage
Social networking continues to grow. It is an activity that 37% of US adult Internet users and 70% of online teens engage in every month. By 2011, about half of all online adults and 84% of online teens in the United States will use social networks.

Marketers continue to experiment with the medium, with $920 million likely to be spent on advertising on social network sites in the US in 2007, rising to $1.6 billion in 2008. Worldwide online social network ad spending is expected to grow by 75% to $2.1 billion in 2008, from $1.2 billion in 2007.

MySpace and Facebook still attract the most attention and money, winning more than 70% of all US social network ad spending in 2007. As social networking matures, the advertising methods are becoming more diversified, including not only profile pages but also search, targeted display ads and widgets.

When the two social network giants announced plans in November 2007 to deliver targeted advertising based on user profile and purchase information, they began to move social network marketing further toward fulfilling its commercial promise. The promise is that brand messages will spread virally among network members and therefore be more effective. However, as the recent backlash against Facebook’s Beacon program has shown, the road is filled with potholes.

Peer recommendations continue to be the holy grail of advertising. Social networking sites are helping to deliver an effective platform for these recommendations.

To read the full report, please contact Jennifer Moore at 212-763-6046 or send an email to jmoore@emarketer.com.

In the News

This section contains a selection of articles pertaining to the Domain Name Industry compiled by Information, Inc.

"Silly Brand Names Get Serious Attention"
Brandweek (12/03/07) Baltazar, Amanda
The new trend in product naming is to use an invented or misspelled word to make the product unique. Experts say that companies have followed naming trends since the 1970s, when companies put "compu" or "tech" in their brand names. In addition to making the product unique, using an invented or misspelled word is practical for companies who want an Internet presence. One expert said that every six-letter English word has already been registered as a domain name and soon all seven-letter words will be taken. "Naming your company like this helps when trying to find a decent domain name, but also to track the conversation about our company," says Robert Gaal, one of the founders of social networking firm Wakoopa. However, experts acknowledge that it is harder to create a successful brand based on a totally made-up name. Instead, many companies introduce brands that have an uncommon spelling for a common sounding name, which consumers are more likely to accept. Successful examples of this include Nintendo's Wii video game console and Motorola's Razr cellular phone. http://www.brandweek.com/bw/news/recent_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003680010

"How Do You Tell a Web Name From a Typo?"
Washington Post (11/28/07) P. C1; Farhi, Paul
As the number of available domain names decreases a new trend has emerged in naming Web-based companies. Many prospective Internet investors are now choosing short, catchy, "nonsense names" instead of paying substantial sums for already registered names. Bebo, Joost, Hulu, Fandango, Kazaa, and Tucows are just some of the more popular nonsense name sites. As of the middle of 2007, VeriSign reported over 60 million registered .com names And as that number increases so too will the need for creative domain names. But naming consultants, who help entrepreneurs find effective names for their brands, advise against going too far with crazy names. Names that make no connection either to the Web site's purpose or to a real-world idea can be a risky bet. Instead these experts suggest finding a name that somehow relates to the idea or concept the site should represent. Facebook and YouTube are both cited as good examples of this kind of naming practice. Another popular domain name approach is to use familiar-but-misspelled words such as Flickr, notes Landor Associates global director of naming and writing Anthony Shore. However, he dislikes both the nonsense name and misspelled word naming strategies. "It's easy to find an existing word and drop out a letter. It's easy to come up with arbitrary sounds, or to just add an 'oo,'" he says. "It's far more difficult to come up with names with real words that have meanings and connections with people."http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/27/AR2007112702321.html?nav=rss_technology

"Google Transfers a Lot of Domains to Google Name Servers"
ResourceShelf (11/20/07)
Google recently transferred 88 domain names that they registered to its name servers. While the domains may have been added to Google's inventory to prevent others from registering them, some of the domains could signal new business ventures for the company. Google registered the domain name gtaxes.com, which could be in preparation of a new online tax prep service that would further expand the services that Google offers. Other domains registered include googlesecret.com, googlefinance.com, and a variety of Android names. http://www.resourceshelf.com/2007/11/20/google-transfers-a-lot-of-domains-to-google-name-servers-a-google-tax-prep-service-in-the-works/

December 2007

In this issue:

Looking Forward to 2008