Krishna De: Insights From Ireland On Digital Marketing, Social Media And Entrepreneurship

What are you prepared to pay for a domain name? There isn't a month that goes by without me looking to purchase another domain name or three for various projects and assignments I am working on.

Memorable domain names are worth tens of thousands to support your online visibility and digital marketing strategy. If you are in the hospitality or tourism business, what difference could a catchy domain mean for you as being a memorable desination.

I noticed today that Sedo the global domain market place has a Travel Auction taking place between 5-12 March 2010. if you can not wait until then, why not look at their current inventory where you can make an offer - these are some travel domain names that caught my attention:

• Morocco.com $2,500,000 
• PuertoRico.com $2,500,000 
• Scotland.com $2,500,000 
• SouthAfrica.com $2,500,000  
• Sweden.com $1,500,000 
• Nepal.com $1,000,000
• Belgium.com $800,000 
• VaticanCity.com $500,000
• NorthernIreland.com $500,000

And if you wonder what were the most expensive domain names in 2009 here they are according to Sedo (thanks to BarryHand.ie for this information):

   1. Fly​.com – £1,152,173.24
   2. Rus​sia​.com – £904,319.74
   3. Call​.com – £678,749.65
   4. Server​.com – £478,143.83
   5. Amer​ica​.com – £474,977.28
   6. Files​.com – £449,845.74
   7. Chris​t​ian​.com – £366,917.29
   8. Top​.com – £327,916.88
   9. Talk​.com – £303,994.08
  10. Brazil​.com – £302,489.98

The NorthernIreland.com or VaticanCity.com doamin names look like bargains don't they?

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Date: Tuesday 19 January 2010

Time: 8.00-9.30am

Venue: The Burlington Hotel, Dublin 4

Cost: Free

I just had word from a colleague of mine on the Digital Marketing Institure that he's hosting a free event with a difference next week. John Ring of RingJohn.com has organised  a session which he tells me will be 'X-Factor' style with a panel and the audience texting in the presenter they want to win.

The three speakers will take one aspect of internet marketing and present a 15-minute fun and informative overview - and there is no charge. Yes there is a free breakfast too! The sessions are as follows:

“Commercial Gain via the Web”

Claire Walsh, Online Sales & Operations Manager UK&IE - www.Google.com

 “Why am I not no.1 in Google?”

John Ring, Search Engine Marketing Specialists - www.RingJohn.com

 “How Barack Obama used the web to win the White House. And how you can use the web to win too.”

Nualan O’Brien, Online Marketing and Writing Specialists - www.TheWordClinic.com

The panel has non other than Damian Ryan, Head of Digital, Results International - www.ResultsIG.com and co-author of 'Understanding Digital Marketing' (oh and me!).

If you'd like to attend just contact Nualan O’Brien at info@thewordclinic.com or on 086604 2895 to book your place - while it's free to attend there are limited spaces available.

Oh if you plan to come perhaps you want to let me know over at the event update on PlanCast.

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Google has announced that it may end its operations in China following a "sophisticated and targeted" cyber attack originating from the country commenting that is it no longer prepared to censor its Chinese search engine - google.cn.

Last year, the search engine market in China was worth an estimated $1bn and analysts previously expected Google to make about $600m from China in 2010 with nearly 340 million Chinese people online, compared with 10 million a decade ago. Google has 31% of the market compared with about 60% controlled by market leader Baidu, which has a close relationship with the Chinese government. Yahoo has less than 10%.

David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer of Google posted in a blog:

Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident--albeit a significant one--was something quite different.

We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn,and potentially our offices in China.

The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences. We want to make clear that this move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China who have worked incredibly hard to make Google.cn the success it is today. We are committed to working responsibly to resolve the very difficult issues.

As a side note, Baidu recently that it is creating an independent company to offer premium online videos to Chinese Internet users including movies, TV shows, sports, and animation, and it will generate its revenue through advertisements. This move with Google and the launch of this new service will no doubt secure Baidu as THE search engine for China.

For more information on this story see the article and short video on the BBC.co.uk site.

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I've written a number of times about link shortening tools on my main blog and over at Facebook.

This weekend I had a problem with one of the shortening tools that I use who were moving servers and none of my short urls worked - in fact I could not access the system at all.

It is was another great reminder that it's not wise to leave important services that you need and rely on to a free third part resource - but we all seem to use short URL services don't we?

Short URL's are increasingly popular (Facebook and Google recently launching their own) as we share links in twitter and in status updates on Facebook, LinkedIn and Skype just to name a few places that I see short URL's referenced.

Just before Christmas, YouTube launched their own short URL service - youtu.be - only for YouTube links. I think this will be used increasingly as it will mean that people recognise the link and will have more confidence in it as it will mean that clicking on the link you will be being directed to YouTube.

To see this feature in action, use AutoShare to link up your YouTube account to social networks. Autoshare enables you to share your activity on YouTube with your community on Facebook, Twitter or Google Reader. Then, whenever you favorite a video on YouTube, for example, that action will get syndicated out to your network, who will see the shortened edition of the video's URL.

I personally don't use Autoshare, but if you are like me there is still a way to benefit from the YouTube short URL.

Use youtu.be manually -

• just take a URL like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7WpEZgr7H8

• and replace the"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=" with "http://youtu.be/"

• to get: http://youtu.be/Z7WpEZgr7H8 - that should take you to my video about how to use Twitter hash tags (see the video below).

This means that you can identify to your followers and fans that it's a YouTube link you are sharing with them.

What's your favourite short URL service? Can you impagine using Youtu.be?

Oh and in case you are interested here are some of the other innovations that took place on YouTube in 2009.

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