Joining the dots for a successful domain

The latest top-level domain bucks the trend by being genuinely interesting for businesses and useful for their customers

Over the past four years I have covered my fair share of top-level domain (TLD) launches. Think of .eu, .mobi, .whatchamacall it; they have all kicked off to great fanfare, then slowly reached respectable if not earth-shattering registration numbers.

That’s the problem with them –­ there are so many out there, companies tend to snap them up out of obligation, and for brand protection reasons. In reality they end up relying on the old favourites –­ .com, .uk and so on.

The .com TLD is pretty much a must-have if your firm wants to compete at a global level, and if you are reaching out to a specific national market, a country code TLD has its advantages.

Well, .tel is very different. “Game changing”, “innovative”, and “very significant” are just some of the terms being used to describe the latest TLD to be launched. The domain is being promoted by London-based registry Telnic as a one-stop shop,
allowing individuals or companies to display in one place all their contact details –­ phone numbers, web and email addresses, physical address, Skype, Twitter, social networking page, GPS co-ordinates –­ the list goes on.

In technical terms, the domain is also different because a .tel URL will not point to a web site stored on a local server. Instead, it will return information stored on the internet’s Domain Name Server.

So what’s the value of having one of these?

Well, if you have a business, it would be incredibly handy to have a place to point people if they needed contact information from you.

And that’s not all. It will allow firms to offer up particular contact details depending on the location and device of the user. A customer could be offered the phone number of the nearest branch of a particular store if they access a retailer’s .tel site via mobile phone, for example. Those nice people at Telnic have also thought about potential privacy issues ­ allowing the domain to only be viewed by those you authorise, although this is more likely to be a concern for individuals than it is for businesses.

In general then, it is meant to cut out all the hassle of ploughing through the web to find a company’s contact details. Now, this column is not meant to be an advert for the new domain, but most of the experts believe this is a big one, and could experience significant take-up, given its unique proposition. So with all this at stake, organisations that missed the initial sunrise registration period –­ which was reserved for trademark holders to put in their applications –­ could be missing out. It’s now landrush time, open to all-comers.

Its ultimate success, of course, will depend on whether these companies actually choose to market their .tels, or if they see it as just another expense, another domain they have to register to prevent cybersquatters and domain name speculators nabbing them first and possibly abusing their brands.

It will also be interesting to see how creative firms get with their marketing. For example, sports apparel titan Nike might want to register a domain such as heretofindyourshoes.tel ­ – to integrate some new marketing campaign with geolocation capabilities. The possibilities are enormous.

But .tel still faces the challenges of any new TLD ­ – to serve a particular market need, increase use over time and therefore sustain long-term popularity. But people are inherently lazy, and .tel has the opportunity to make peoples’ lives easier by offering one place to go which contains all the contact information anyone could need.
It is for this reason that I think the domain will prosper where .biz, .mobi and others have failed.

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