Being Cheryl: Social Media Marketing Tips from Columbus, Ohio

ICANN, The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is a non-profit organization based in southern California you’ve probably never heard of. But ICANN is the body in charge of domain names and IP addresses and thus pretty damn important to the interwebz as we know ‘em.

On June 25th, ICANN voted to expand domains to include generic addresses. When the proposal goes into effect later this year, internet users will be able to buy domains ranging from cities to brands or companies to proper names.

Currently, there are 280 domain addresses that all websites fit into: generic domains like .com, .net, .org, .gov, .biz and .edu, and more specific domains like .country and .territory. Here’s the breakdown of top-level domains currently, from ICANN itself

What this means:

“The city of New York could buy its own suffix—to get to a city site, you’d type Police.nyc or Fire.nyc, and you’d e-mail Michael Bloomberg at Mayor@cityhall.nyc. Companies might do something similar: Twitter could register .twitter and give each of its users a quicker way to get to their pages—Fmanjoo.twitter instead of Twitter.com/fmanjoo. - Slate Magazine, July 7 2009

Apparently, the addition of descriptive domains is supposed to prevent cybersquatting and stop confusion between companies with similar names, like COSI the science center and COSi the restaurant chain.

So should companies and individuals be planning and plotting their NEW SUPER CUSTOM AWESOME DOMAIN NAME?!?! Um, no.

(That’s Shakespeare, right? Close enough)

Chris Brogan made a similar point when Facebook unleashed vanity URLs (within 15 minutes, 500,000 vanity URL’s were taken.) He opted NOT to get facebook.com/chrisbrogan, not because it was unavailable, but because he, as a content creator and user, adds value to Facebook - Facebook, by giving him a custom domain, does NOT make him valuable.

And yes, from a branding standpoint I think it’s good to own your name as many places as possible, and to keep your usernames consistent, but if what you’re saying is valuable, people will find you wherever you go.

When I first started blogging, I was DEVASTATED that CherylHarrison.com was taken by an artist.  I, truthfully, thought that meant I couldn’t be a “real” blogger. So when it came time to buy a domain, I asked Twitter what to choose. I was hoping for a brilliant, witty URL suggestion to use in lieu my name. The only suggestion I got that was actually AVAILABLE was “BeingCheryl.” I thought it was stupid. But I bought it anyway.

And here I am, almost a year later, blogging strong. People (not a lot of people, but enough to make me happy) KNOW beingcheryl.com. People run Google searches for “being cheryl.” Not because they know me - those people still search for Cheryl Harrison (and still find me.) And not because the URL is fun or memorable. Because I’ve created content that they have found one way or another that they want to come back to. My URL could be “becauseyouhavenothingbettertodorightnowthanreadablogbycherylharrison.com” and the people who I’ve helped, taught or humored, would find it.

Slate pulled out a great example in their article about the domain change:

“Last year, someone got on Twitter and began tweeting as Shaquille O’Neal. When the real Shaq got wind of the faker, he didn’t offer to pay for his identity; rather, he set up another name—The_Real_Shaq—and set the record straight. Now, it no longer matters that Shaq doesn’t own his Twitter name; when you Google Shaq Twitter, The_Real_Shaq comes up first… We all should follow Shaq’s example—don’t ever pay for a screen name or a domain name again.”- Slate Magazine, July 7 2009

How much importance do you put in a name?