Continuing where the previous post left off:
Let's talk about how to create the right strategy for your domain name management needs.
Due to the way the internet has developed over the past many years, companies are increasingly looking at domain names with more respect because they are now viewing them as an essential element of their intellectual property.
There are many risks to the intellectual property in terms of domains for organizations.
There is cybersquatting, there is typosquatting and other ways a company's brand identity can be put at risk.
The most common way of brand infrigement is abuse of a company's legitmate trademark, brand or other online property.
As the industry changes, the threat of brand infringement has increased consistently.
Due to the value of trademark domain names in the market, the risks of missing a renewal or not participating in a new domain name launch could cause a lot of troble to a company and it's brand.
Even though many larger companies are increasingly getting aware of the importance of domain names for their business, a majority of companies still don't have a clear picture of the domain name industry or even their own domain portfolio. Some companies who have outsourced their domain name needs to large vendors don't know all they should about their vendors and partners
Even though companies have large domain name portfolios, they rarely have a defined process to keep their portfolios in good health.
A good domain strategy should have the following aspects:
1. Do a complete and exhaustive review of your domain portfolio
This is the first and most important item a company should invest it's time and effort in. Every organization should know every domain name it owns and has been registered under it's name. This process of taking an inventory is very helpful to identify the foot print of the company's exposure to the domain name industry.
Consolidate this information into a central repository. Whether you are using a partner company, a vendor or handling the activities of this domain name yourself, make sure your staff knows all the details down to the last domain name that your company owns and has paid for (details like who are the contacts on these domain names, when are they set to expire etc.)
All details of a domain name are stored in a central repository called a WHOIS database. If you have a large number of domains in your portfolio, you can use the service of a domain name vendor or software tools.
At this point, it is also a good idea to consider if it would be good to bring all your domain names under one umbrella (consolidate your multiple vendors into one - this may or may not make sense for you to do, but it's a good idea to think about).
Once you have your portfolio in place along with all the details about each domain name, do a rundown of each domain name to see if there are any potential IP infringements going on here. Are there some domain names you find that is owned by your company but is now directing traffic to an ad driven page to generate revenues. Make a list of all these items and send them to the legal team in order to pursue any legal options.
Also, at this point you should decide if you should take domain names that are inactive and not going anywhere and direct them to your existing websites.
Also, at this point you must develop a set of rules to standardise how your domain name details look to the outside world. Make sure there is a standard set of information (like company name, contact detais) that are uniformly applied to all your domain names.
Get some key people in your organization upto speed with the domain name industry and task them with leading the above efforts.
2. Set up a mechanism to report and monitor your portfolio:
Doing a complete and exhaustive audit of your portfolio is great but really doesn't help you as much if you don't monitor and manage your portfolio.
Every domain name has different expiration dates throughout the year .There are many different products being made available by ICANN (like new ccTlds or new sTlds etc.). Rules for tld's change frequently.
You need a system to monitor all this and manage them efficiently. You can either create an internal application to handle these monitoring tasks or you could outsource these tasks to a domain name management service provider (which should ideally be your registrar - the vendor that actually registers names on your behalf).
Make sure your provider is a registrar accredited by ICANN and can register all gTlds and a majority of ccTlds and sTlds.
Also make sure the provider can assign you tools and personnel who will service your needs in a dedicated and expedient fashion.
And please, if you have a large portfolio of domain names, don't decide to run everything with an excel spreadsheet. You would be surprised how many large companies really don't pay much attention to this point.
3. Strategize - look for infrigements, look for competitors, monetize
Now that you have completed the first and second tasks noted above, you can move onto looking for infringements of your domain names. Run your domain portfolio against search engines to check if there are domain names that are very similar to or sound like your company's name or your brand names.
For example if your company is calledd "ACME Widgets", look to see if there is an acmewidgets.eu that is already taken, look to see if there is an acmewidgetssucks.com that is taken and see where these domain names lead you to. Do they go to your competitor's websites, do they go to some cybersquatter's site?
Make a list of these and review the legalities of these practices and if these are somethig worth (legally) pursuing.
Look for domain names that could be assets of your competitors or your vendors or of companies that you are interested in acquiring. Survey these and put them into your system.
Look to see if you are interested in monetizing opportunities. If you have a large number of domain names sitting idly, there are some very interesting ways to monetize them.
Conculsion:
In this two part article, we have covered the issue of domain names as it applies to the corporations and stressed the need for having a domain name strategy that is both exhaustive and efficient at the same time.
The internet is growing very fast and the complexities around domain name management can be a significant cause of concern for corporations legally, technically and financially.
Companies must be proactive in setting up a clear strategy to identify potential problems and in taking advantage of the many tools and providers available in the industry today to handle threats of intellectual property theft, brand infrigement, integrity of their product names while at the same time maintaining an edge over their competitors in this space.
Please feel free to comment on this post or send an email to me if you have any questions.
This two part article is a copy right of Anwar Mehdi. You must have explicit permission from the author in order to distribute or republish the articile.
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