Building Your Website. When to Choose .com or a New Generic Top Level Domain (gTLD)

If you want to build a website, you’ll likely go to a domain name registrar such as GoDaddy.com and start checking which dotcom names are still available. Chances are, your first choice may be registered to someone else.

If you don’t feel like battling with others to scoop up the remaining, catchy .com names, you have a lot of options now according to NPR, which ran a story recently about the launch of new generic top level domain (gTLD) names such as .cool, .buzz and .coffee.

If you’re not familiar with the acronym gTLD, this is the extension that comes at the end of a web address such as “.com”, “.net” or “.org”. Per NPR, there is demand for new gTLDs since there’s a lack of real estate for those that want to set-up a new site on the web. I may not be able to register the name heather.jackson.com, but as of this writing I could register other modest URLs such as heather.jackson.cool, heather.jackson.hot and heather.jackson.rocks. 

The thing is, the Internet is not as crowded as you may think or NPR suggests. Since the early 2000s, there has also been the option to register URLs with generic top level domain names such as .biz, .info and .name. According to Domain Tools, .biz only has 2.3% of the number of registered domains as .com. This means you still have the potential to grab some new Internet real estate in the .biz neighborhood. Be forewarned: even though .biz, .name and .info have been around over 10 years, they do not have the same cache or familiarity with consumers as .com does. If negative brand perception is not a concern, you can be assured that there is no penalizing effect to SEO from using a new gTLD. Matt Cutts at Google has gone on record to dismiss the SEOs out there who state that having a .com name will improve your search engine results page (SERP) rankings. 

My personal recommendation would be to stick with a .com name unless one of these rules apply:

• You need to protect your brand across the web
• You see the potential to resell the name at a profit
• You would like a catchy website name for personal use

If you’d like more information on the new gTLDs or how to register for the new domain names, Moz has a great blog post that outlines all the details.

Give the Gift of Time: Stop Scheduling Pointless Meetings

It seems that we live in a culture of meetings. Some office workers, according to the Harvard Business Review, like the status and social interaction that only a calendar completely full with one-on-ones, lunches, monthly meetings, quarterly off-sites and weekly status checks can provide. The problem is that few of these meetings are actually productive. Likely the meetings on the calendar have too many people on the invite list, no clear agenda and worse yet—no actionable results. Recent statistics show that pointless meetings are becoming a trend:

Office workers spend an average of 4 hours per week in meetings. They feel more than half of that time is wasted. 
Opinion Matters, for Epson and the Centre for Economics & Business Research
May 2012

The #1 time-waster at the office is "too many meetings, up from No 3 in 2008." according to 47% of the surveyed. 
Salary.com
2012

You have control over the meetings you schedule. Do you want to be the one holding meetings that no one shows up to? Or would you like to keep your meetings productive with active attendance? 

Take these things into consideration and give your coworkers and employees a great gift—time back in their day:

Do we actually need to meet?

Could I accomplish my objective if there wasn’t a set time to discuss this on the calendar? Many times a few quick hallway conversations are all you need on an issue followed-up by an email. Instead of just firing off that meeting request from your desk, walk over and talk to the people you need answers from.

Do we need to decide by committee?

I’ve sat through meetings where evening events for conferences were debated, videos were dissected for minutia and themes were discussed at length. If you’re running events, secure input from a few key stakeholders and then let the masses live with the decisions. Chances are they’ll be thankful that they didn’t have to weigh the pros and cons of having a dinner at the House of Blues versus the Hard Rock Hotel.

Make sure you have the right people

Instead of inviting all 20 people to a meeting who MIGHT be needed, why not assign the appropriate owners? If you don’t know whom to invite, reach out to the department head and ask them to assign a representative. Have the representative send a back up if he/she is unable to attend.

Be clear on your objective

Resources are limited and your coworkers are busier than ever. To make sure people will attend your meetings, be very clear on what you’d like to discuss and the outcomes you hope to obtain.

Keep meetings short

Time is money. The longer you hold a meeting, the less time there is to do actual work. Instead of scheduling an hour meeting, why not start with 30 minutes? This will force you to be concise and get to the point. You will also encourage attendance if team members know that you’re being considerate of their time.

Next time you’re about to send that meeting request—you know, the standing meeting with 10 invitees and no set agenda—consider some of the above tactics and turn your meeting from a productivity waster into a productivity enhancer.  Your colleagues and employees will thank you for it.

Overwhelmed at Work? A Kanban Board Can Help.

Among advanced countries, the United States ranks 28 out of 36 in work-life balance according to the OECD Better Life Index. Today, Americans have more access to housing and potential earnings, but need to work longer hours in order to obtain wealth. With more demands on your time than ever before, how can you accomplish more when you have fewer resources to do so? There are many great inexpensive tools out there that can help you do more with less and maximize your free time.

One of the tools that I have found invaluable is LeanKit. LeanKit provides the ability to develop a virtual Kanban board to organize work. If you’re not familiar with Kanban, it’s a principle that came from Toyota in their efforts to reduce waste by applying lean practices to the manufacturing process. With a Kanban board, work is organized into different stages with work-in-progress limits based on available resources. For Toyota, or software companies that use Lean-Agile methodologies, the purpose of the board is to make sure resources are maximized and that there isn’t a bottleneck somewhere in the process.

For an individual contributor, the Kanban board can also be helpful for managing workload. Instead of letting projects pile up, you can put limits on the amount of projects that you can have in progress at any one time. Ever have that day where you feel like you have so much to do, but don’t know where to begin? With a Kanban board, you can better organize your work so that you don’t feel so overwhelmed with your to do list. In addition, you can provide your boss visibility into your Kanban board so he or she will know your available bandwidth to take on a new project.

How does it work?

Using LeanKit, you can set-up a Kanban board for free and determine the stages (i.e. starting, active, finish, pre-production, etc.) you want and the limits of work for each stage. If you have an overflow of projects, you can send these to the backlog and then begin working on them as soon as a current project is finished. I’ve found a great way to manage work is to split larger projects into smaller chunks so that you can move a project through the process within two weeks. You can also use this added visibility to make space for more important projects, put projects on hold or send them to the backlog to start on in the future.

I am not associated with LeanKit or paid to endorse LeanKit. All comments made are my own.

How Fitbit Succeeds at Consumer Engagement

For those of us that love gadgets, self-data monitoring and keeping healthy, the Fitbit is the ideal gadget. In case you’re not familiar with Fitbit, the Fitibit is a tracker you wear around your wrist—similar to a bracelet or watch—and it will magically count your calories, steps taken and monitor how well you sleep. Actually there is a lot of science and mathematics behind how the device figures out your steps, but it seems supernatural.

Not only is the Fitbit a great device for keeping track of your health, the company is a master at using marketing tools such as gamification, social and community to keep users engaged.

Gamification is the use of gaming principals—like earning levels or points—in order to reward users for engaging. This is similar to Yelp’s leader boards or becoming a “mayor” on Foursquare for checking into a place more than anyone else. For Fitbit, gamification includes providing badges for reaching different milestones—lifetime steps or walking 5K, 10K and 15K steps in one day. In addition, you’ll get a big green smile for every goal that you meet. I personally love trying to reach as many goals of possible. Fitibit has daily goals for number of steps, miles walked, calories burned, number of active minutes and ounces of water drank. 

Implementing social into the Fitbit application helps to keep users motivated as well. With your permission, the Fitbit application will look for users in your smartphone contacts and Facebook friends and provide a list of Fitbit users you can add. Once connected, you can view your friends’ steps, send messages, cheers and taunts. In addition, if you like to brag to a wider group of people, the application allows you to send automatic tweets as well as Facebook and WordPress blog posts from your Fitbit on your activity.

My Fitbit Dashboard - Friends names removed for privacy

If earning badges and competing with friends isn’t enough to keep you engaged, Fitbit also provides a community to help keep you motivated. You have the opportunity to join different types of groups for Fitbitters ranging from groups for desk-jockeys to age-based (30s, 40s, 60s) to location.

If you’re in the business of trying to engage users, Fitbit provides some powerful lessons on how a combination of gamification, social and community can help keep users motivated and engaged.

Are Bowl Game Sponsorships a Good Investment?

On New Year’s Eve I was watching the Chick-fil-A Bowl and instead of focusing in on the action on the field, my thoughts went to the return on investment (ROI) from having the naming rights to a bowl game. According to Sports Business Now, the cost to brand a bowl game can range from $300K for the Heart of Dallas Bowl to $17.5M for the Sugar Bowl or the Fiesta Bowl. Chick-fil-A falls into the economy bowl plan with a mere investment of $2.5 million.

When I dug a bit deeper into how the naming rights for bowl games are sold, I found that the fee is not just for having your name on the marquee. According to Sponsorship.com, these naming rights are really just “value adds” for multi-year season-long media buys with ESPN. Under their 5-year deal with ESPN, Chick-fil-A has media buys on ESPN as well as the naming rights to the Peach Bowl. With their brand renaming the Peach Bowl, Chick-fil-A can use that exposure to help promote their brand on a national level. Currently Chick-fil-A operates in 39 states and Washington D.C.

In addition to having exposure to a predominately male audience that is an ideal target for Chick-fil-A, there are also those hard-to-measure benefits for the Company such as the goodwill from the community for sponsoring a local event or the hospitality aspect of having a luxury suite at your own bowl game. In the case of Chick-fil-A, sponsoring the former Peach Bowl makes sense since the bowl game occurs in the Company’s hometown of Atlanta. Although the bowl sponsorship clearly has some tangible benefits, I’d be interested in seeing the results Chick-fil-A is achieving from earned media and search. Some metrics I would measure to determine ROI would be as follows:

• Nielsen ratings - # of viewers
• Number of social media hits on game day - mentions, follows, posts and shares
• Number of news stories - blog mentions, articles written or press releases
• Lift in branded keyword searches on game day and the days following
• New visits to Chick-fil-A’s website during or immediately following the bowl game
• Unique visits to the website that end on a search for the nearest Chick-fil-A location
• Any bumps in sales in the days following the bowl game

Chick-fil-A has several options to measure the success of their bowl game sponsorship campaign. Do you think owning the naming rights to a bowl game provides a demonstrable ROI?