What’s in a name?

Opinion: September 12, 2012 at 12:00a.m.

By Naseem Javed

McClatchy-Tribune

City halls are to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in dot names, a new type of domain-name system designed to change the global branding world. What’s all this noise about million-dollar dot domain names? Cities have taken leadership and allocated million-dollars-plus in resources to acquire the dot name status?

For example, New York City has applied for dot NYC, so it will have a domain www.nyc. Other cities have applied too; dot Berlin, dot Paris, dot Dubai, dot Durban, dot Amsterdam, dot Barcelona, dot Brussels, dot Capetown, dot Corsica, dot Africa, dot Helsinki, dot London, dot Madrid, dot Miami, dot Catalonia, dot Moscow, dot Rio, dot Roma, and dot Mumbai and dozens more.

With costs running into millions for each single name project, the city halls are expected to make huge profits from the sale of sub domain names while increasing the visibility of their city brand for tourism and investments. These are the new age Internet tools to go farther, touch local and global audiences and create massive cyber-interaction.

Highest bidders

A destination dot name, for example, www.nyc would exclusively belong to the city of New York and the city hall would sell thousands of sub domain brand names like, www.hotel.nyc, www.limo.nyc, www.motels.nyc, www.bargains.nyc, www.work.nyc or www.shows.nyc. Each of these sub-brand domain names could be sold to the highest bidders. Also tens of thousands of stand-alone local businesses would wish to become a sub-brand under the city’s master generic top-level domain-like InterLink.nyc. (MicroTech.nyc, BillyJoel.nyc or Sunshine.nyc will enjoy the benefit of being part of a larger .NYC brand hierarchy and find these types of domain names far superior in memorability, typing and ease of operation.)

The city hall could park most of their services for local or global consumers by making it extremely simple. Like, www.permits.nyc, parks.nyc, parking.nyc, shelter.nyc, fishing.nyc, trails.nyc, schools.nyc, buses.nyc and such targeted websites will dominate the cyber highways for the local or global visitors.

For all types of geographical landmarks, major cities, towns and villages in need of visibility and local and global interaction will find this type of undertaking very essential for the community. Despite its million-dollars-plus tag, the fact remains it can quickly turn around handsome profit. A new age of Internet is leaving the massive social media behind and bringing all of us selectively closer via cyber communities while dot name revolution is very big but most people are just learning about it as you read.

Money-trees

It’s very important that the senior management of municipalities acquire workable understanding on these cyber-image branding platforms, some of which are capable of becoming money-trees for municipalities.

Simple and great names will rule the world. Complicated, hard to spell or multiple part names will impose difficulties. Examples like, dot Saskatchewan, dot Albuquerque, dot Sault Ste Marie, dot Ypsilanti or dot Lake Winnibigoshish-type names will have less appeal.

Municipalities of the world are slowly awakening to these brand new types of dot destination challenges and getting ready to face the new game changer.

Naseem Javed is the founder of ABC Namebank (www.abcnamebank.com).Distributed by MCT Information Services.