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In a recent Advertising Age (AdAge.com) article by Jeremy Mullman, he outlines the two sides to the debate over identity verification technology on social networks to keep sex offenders out, as well as keep underage children from logging in with say, their parents login and password information.
The crux of the debate seems to be over whether identity verification is even attainable, or if the attention it is getting is more of a political play. Some feel there really is no fail-safe way to verify all visitors, yet proponets for tighter security say that those who can be ID'ed and who should not be on the network are better than nothing. Regardless, social networking experts don't seem to be concerned if safety ID verification mechanisms are put in place, citing that gatekeeping access to social networks based on certain permission levels could actually ehance the user experience.
What’s your take? Join the conversation and tell us if you think secure social networks are even possible. Or, will parents simply have to take a more active role in their children's online lives to help maintain their online safety?
By Anita Campbell
Published: Inc. Technology
A rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but if your business name isn't followed by a dot-com your customers may never find your business.
Does your choice of domain name for your website really matter?
I’ll say it does!
Your domain name is like your street address. How will customers find you if they don’t know where to look -- or worse, if they go to what they think is your address only to find your company is not there? Here are ten tips to choosing a domain name for your business:
1. Make it a dot-com -- Henry Ford is rumored to have said about his Model T Ford that you could have it in any color “so long as it’s black.” That same attitude pretty much sums up one naming philosophy: choose any domain name, so long as it’s a “.com” extension. In the United States, most people typing in a domain name will type “.com” by default. With over 70 million registered URLs, the “.com” extension is by far the most popular, with “.net”, “.org”, and ”.info” lagging far behind in popularity, according to the ICANN Wiki.
2. Short and easy to spell -- Shorter is better. A short URL is easier to remember and less likely to be misspelled than a long one. For obvious reasons, avoid any domain name that by its nature is hard to spell or confusing.
3. Company names and brand names -- Whenever possible, register your company name as your main URL. It’s what people usually try first when looking for your business website. You might also consider registering your product/service names as additional URLs. The reason? Some companies now create mini-sites specifically for products and services -- think Jif.com or Tide.com. Or they point the product URL to a section of their main website that features that product.
4. Keywords and household words -- Some companies register industry-specific terms, common words or short phrases that your customers or prospective customers may commonly type into a browser. According to Monte Cahn, CEO of Moniker.com, “Seventy percent of people type directly in the browser address field, while the other 30 percent go through a search engine.” This has increased the value of domains that are household words, easy-to-remember phrases, or keywords. Domain names such as Autos.com and Seniors.com sold for more than $1 million each, he says.
5. Personal names -- Register your own first and last name as your URL if you are a consultant, writer, or other professional whose reputation in your field is critical to drawing customers. Think TomPeters.com. You have several options here. For instance, you can use your personal name as your business domain. Or, you can point your personal-name URL to a separate company website. Either way, people looking for you are more likely to also find your business website.
6. Be defensive with misspellings -- Buy up common misspellings of your domain name. That way, you don’t leave traffic on the table -- and competitors won’t be able to buy the misspelled domains and siphon off traffic intended for your site. According to Cahn, try this method to find misspellings: Get a number of people in your office to type in your domain name 100 times each in a browser. If you don’t have employees, get your family and friends involved. Keep track of every mistyped URL. Those are the URLs you want to buy and point to your site.
7. Protect your brand with other extensions -- While the “.com” extension is the most popular, as a defensive measure consider also snapping up other extensions of your domain name. Secure the .net, .info, .biz and similar extensions. If you do business internationally, think about securing country extensions, also (such as .co.uk).
8. Don’t forget mobile -- With mobile devices becoming more popular, big brands are starting to register and develop their .mobi sites specifically for mobile users. So do what the big boys do and register that .mobi. You may have no plans to build out a .mobi site today. But as mobile usage grows you may be glad you have that domain in two or three years.
9. Avoid long hyphenated URLs -- Ochool of thought in vogue a few years ago was to register domain names with strings of keywords separated by hyphens. The reason? It was thought that you could get higher rankings in the search engines if these keywords were in your URL. This approach led to some ridiculously long URLs prone to misspellings and confusion. This approach has fallen out of favor in most camps, as it is not clear that search engines give any preference to hyphenated keyword URLs.
10. Register domains for as long as possible -- A final word of advice: secure your main domain names for a minimum of several years so they don’t expire out from under you. Ten years is best. What’s $89 (the current cost of a 10-year registration through GoDaddy.com) when your company’s entire Web presence is at stake?
The larger domain name registrars will send pre-expiration reminders or even automatically renew on your behalf. Sign up for these protections whenever available. Be especially careful when using smaller resellers of domain names, as they may not offer these expiration-avoidance features. More than one small business owner I know has been rudely surprised by an expired domain.
Anita Campbell is a writer, speaker and radio talk show host who closely follows trends in the small business market at her site, Small Business Trends.
Critics Say Laws to Block Access to Sites a 'Political Solution, not a Safety Solution'
By Jeremy Mullman
Published: Advertising Age, July 30, 2007
CHICAGO (AdAge.com) -- Advocates of stricter identity-verification measures on social-networking sites got a boost last week when MySpace revealed it had deleted 29,000 registered sex offenders from its network, particularly in North Carolina, by far the furthest along of any state in attempting to legislate verification guidelines for social networks.
But critics say the North Carolina bill -- which requires minors to get parental permission to sign up -- illustrates the futility of trying to effectively verify who is online. "My son knows all my information, so there's nothing stopping him from signing on as me and giving himself permission to be on there," said Rick Lane, senior VP-government affairs for MySpace parent News Corp. "Verification is a political solution, not a safety solution."
The bill passed the North Carolina Senate by a 49-0 margin in May and figures to soon get a vote in the House. If it passes and Gov. Mike Easley decides to sign it, a lawsuit from one or all of the social networks -- and perhaps even from portals such as AOL, which has signaled its opposition -- is seen as inevitable.
Security questions
Providers have typically argued that adequate verification technology doesn't exist, and that imperfect verification would give minors a false sense of security.
While advocates such as North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper acknowledge that the technology is imperfect, they say the number of sex offenders already on MySpace makes not acting a worse option.
"It does give us more urgency," said Jay Chaudhuri, special counsel to Mr. Cooper. "It's illustrative of the potential harm that exists when you have predators mingling online with minors."
Mr. Chaudhuri said there are effective models of verification. He pointed to online tobacco sales in California, which require follow-up phone calls or postcards. He also cited the exhaustive methods used on most financial websites.
Negligible effect?
Some social-networking experts question whether gating online communities will do any harm. "I actually don't think it's something they should be afraid of," said Dave Gormley, chief product marketing officer for Tubes, which markets a tool that helps social-network users control who gets to view which information on their personal pages.
He said measures that increase privacy -- whether it's keeping personal information about a child from a potential predator or keeping weekend-in-Vegas photos from a would-be employer -- can enhance a user's experience on the site.
OMG -- My Boss Wants to 'Friend' Me On My Online Profile
By Jared Sandberg
Published: The Wall Street Journal, July 10, 2007, Page B1
Paul Dyer was always able to hold off his boss's invitations to party by employing that arms-length response: "We'll have to do that sometime," he'd say.
But when his boss, in his 30s, invited Mr. Dyer, 24 years old, to be friends on the social-networking sites MySpace and Facebook, dodging wasn't so easy. On the one hand, accepting a person's request to be friends online grants them access to the kind of intimacy never meant for office consumption, such as recent photos of keggers and jibes from friends. ("Still wearing that lampshade?")
Have you found yourself in an awkward situation in an online social network? Please share your experiences2.But declining a "friend" request from a colleague or a boss is a slight. So, Mr. Dyer accepted the invitation, then removed any inappropriate or incriminating photos of himself -- "I'd rather speak vaguely about them," he says -- and accepted the boss's invitation.
Mr. Dyer, it turns out, wasn't the one who had to be embarrassed. His boss had photos of himself attempting to imbibe two drinks at once, ostensibly, Mr. Dyer ventures, to send the message: "I'm a crazy, young party guy." The boss also wore a denim suit ("I'd never seen anything like it," Mr. Dyer says) and posed in a photo flashing a hip-hop backhand peace sign.
It was painful to watch. "I hurt for him," says Mr. Dyer.
Like email and "buddy lists" before them, social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace provide a definition of the word "friend" so expansive that it includes perfect strangers. Yet, strangers are the easy part. It can be a lot creepier to interact intimately with someone you sort of know than someone you don't know at all.
"Nothing changes when a stranger invites you to be a friend," says Nina Singh, a market-research consultant. But when one of her clients "friended" her, she saw a semierotic photo of him topless, posed and softly lit. "When you see your client's pubic bone, something has changed."
Victor Sanchez, 54, a senior development director, was once invited to join a site and was surprised to see a photograph of a younger colleague's seahorse tattoo. "Sometimes it's good to learn things about a colleague much later -- or never at all," he says.
These networking sites assist existing social relationships, letting people easily plan events, share pictures and keep up-to-date with far-flung friends. Once they penetrate the office, however, such sites can create awkward moments, particularly with colleagues who commit the social felony of attempted hipness. Dare I say, "Whatup, homey?"
When it comes to the boss, there is a real dilemma. You're caught between a career-limiting rejection of virtual friendship or a career-limiting access to photos of yourself glassy-eyed at a party. "All these social relationships -- apples and oranges -- are getting crammed into one category of friends," says Tom Boellstorff, associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, who is writing a book on the virtual community Second Life.
After one senior marketing coordinator at a law firm was invited by one of the lawyers to be his friend, she felt compelled to accept the invitation, even though she had no intention of socializing with him outside the office. He remarked once after an office meeting that he noticed she had a boyfriend, as listed on her online profile.
"It was strange," she says. "I was like, 'Why are you on Facebook?' "
Prospective employers also seem to have no compunction conducting searches on job applicants before they call them in for interviews. "We'll Google them and I know that we've done MySpace searches," says attorney Caroline Kert of prospective hires.
She's mostly looking for slams against a former employer or exposed proprietary information. She says she'd never hold against applicants something like, say, a photo of them wearing a fur bikini. Good thing. Ms. Kert, a regular at the Burning Man Festival, has pictures of herself sporting just that on MySpace.
J.D. Lloyd, a law student working at a firm, isn't taking any chances. At 6-foot-2 and 250 pounds, he removed a photo of himself in a Florida Marlins baseball jersey that was a mere "youth large." "It was tight," he says. "There may or may not have been midriff in some of those pictures."
It used to be that employees were told to keep their personal lives out of work. Now, some bosses beg for it. Data analyst Valerie Jewett, 23, accepted a boss as a friend even though she likes to keep her personal and professional lives separate.
He's a nice guy, she says, but his late-30s ungrooviness was evident when he wrote a message to her on the "wall" on her homepage. The message made her roll her eyes. "What a ko-wink-i-dink to find y'all on here! Yeehaw!!"
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