posted by Robin Tooms @ 10:39 AM
This week, ICANN announced that by this time next year, additional top-level domains for businesses and industries would be open for purchase. This means that more meaningful and specific domains, such as .hotel or .houston, will be available. Currently, there are only 21 top-level domains (ie: .com, .org, etc), so this would make the domain choices virtually limitless.
What does this mean for your brand? Well, if you want to ensure that you are able to purchase your “.brand” domain, then now is the time to register your trademark if you haven’t done so already. According to the ICANN website:
“Trademarks will not be automatically reserved. But there will be an objection-based mechanism for trademark owners where their arguments for protection will be considered.”
Granted, not every company will need to purchase their brand as a top-level domain extension – you will need to determine what make sense for your brand strategy. But, now is the perfect time to revisit your domain structure and see determine an action plan for next year. At minimum, you might want to consider additional domains instead of the typical .com and .net ownership now to secure your place and protect your brand value online.
6.26.2008
posted by Robin Tooms @ 9:42 PM
Bethany Haley, our President, was honored with an Individual Leadership Award at the NIRI gala awards dinner in San Diego, California, where the 2008 NIRI Annual Conference was held from June 8-11, 2008. Bethany has been an active NIRI member since 2002, and in addition to helping NIRI grow their local membership (meeting their goal by 200%), she has also been actively involved in the Southwest Regional Conference and the redesign of the NIRI Houston website.
With more than 1,400 investor relations professionals in attendance, the NIRI Annual Conference is the largest gathering of IR professionals in the US. In addition to attending, Savage also had a booth, so take a look at those photos!
(NIRI is the professional association of corporate officers and investor relations consultants responsible for communications among corporate management, shareholders, securities analysts and other financial publics. NIRI’s 4,400 members represent nearly 2,100 publicly held companies and $5.4 trillion in stock market capitalization. For more information, please visit www.niri.org.)
6.18.2008
posted by Robin Tooms @ 9:38 AM
Broc Romnek shot this footage of our booth at the NIRI 2008 National Conference with this note: “lots of cool annual reports. The death of paper is premature… – Broc Romanek”.
Thanks for the mention, Broc!
6.16.2008
posted by Robin Tooms @ 7:51 AM
Last week we were at the NIRI 2008 Annual Conference in San Diego. As the official branding sponsor for the event, we were glad to finally see the fruits of our labor very visibly displayed in the exhibit area and in every presentation. In fact, one of the first visuals that greeted everyone was the large presentations screens. It’s always fun to see the visuals 20ft tall! Thanks to everyone at the office who worked so hard on this, and to the people at NIRI, who were wonderful to work with.
There was always something to do in the evenings, and as it turns out, lots of great restaurants nearby. We did have a great meal at Blue Point in the Gaslamp Quarter, which we would recommend.
We also had a booth in the exhibit area, and made the shortlist of the IR Web Report’s “Who to visit at NIRI’s vendor showcase”. From the photos, you can see that the booths themselves were not too large, but we were able to get a lot of traffic based on the quality of the work (and giveaways help here too).
