Rejected .CO Sunrise Names Now Available in Landrush

By James Koole on July 12th, 2010
Posted in Industry News » Tags: .CO
1 Comment »

We’re in the Landrush phase of the .CO domain extension launch and for those looking for some great domains, CO Internet S.A.S., the registry operator for the .CO domain extension, has just published a list of domains that were originally put in as Sunrise applications, but that were eventually rejected.

Download the full list (PDF 250kB)

These domains are available for registration right now in the Landrush phase. If you had previously put in applications for Landrush domains only to find them unavailable, you may wish to re-submit the order as the name in question might be on the list of newly available domains.

Landrush Extended

Landrush was extended by the registry and will now close on Friday, July 16th at noon EDT. Landrush is open to everyone – there is a $5.00 non-refundable registration fee, and successful Landrush orders are $220 which includes the first year of registration (all costs shown are in US dollars). In the event that there are multiple applications for the same domain, that domain will go into an auction process where those who had submitted an application for the domain in question will be able to bid against each other for the rights to the domain.

General Availability starts July 20

As mentioned, .CO goes into General Availability on July 20th at 2:00pm EDT. OpenSRS is taking pre-orders for General Availability now and on launch day we’ll be attempting to register as many of those pre-orders as we possibly can on launch day.

For General Availability pre-orders, there are no fees other than the regular $25 one-year registration fee. If the order is successful on launch day, the domain is awarded and your account is charged. If the order isn’t successful, you aren’t charged anything.

Is your Reseller account funded?

For those with General Availability pre-orders in the queue, we will be putting the $25 registration fee for each pre-order on hold this week to ensure that the required funds are available at the time of attempted registration on July 20, 2010. If the registration is successful, you’ll be charged for the registration. If the order is unsuccessful, the hold on the funds will be released and you’ll be charged nothing.

Please ensure that you have adequate funds in your account to cover the full value of the domains you have on pre-order.

More Information

Be sure to visit our .CO launch page where you will find more information about the .CO launch, including a package of marketing materials you can use in your promotion of the .CO extension. You might also want to check out the .CO webinar archive if you didn’t attend, or haven’t seen it yet. And the CO Internet website is also a good source of up-to-date launch information as well.

Posted in Industry News | Tags: .CO

OpenSRS rated “best bet” for securing a .CO domain name

By Ben Lucier on July 7th, 2010
Posted in Industry News » Tags: .CO, ccTLD
1 Comment »

As general availability for the new .CO fast approaches, Domain Name Wire listed OpenSRS as a “best bet” for registering a .CO domain name based on a hyper-competitive price tag of $25. You can read more about maximizing your chances of getting a .CO domain at the Domain Name Wire.

You can also learn more information (including webinars, launch dates, etc) on our .CO information page.

Posted in Industry News | Tags: .CO, ccTLD

Using Social Media? Improve Your Listening Skills Using Twitter Search

By Ben Lucier on July 2nd, 2010
Posted in General »
4 Comments »

In an April 2010 survey, we asked our resellers about their social media engagement efforts. A respectable 39% said they were actively using social media tools like Twitter to acquire new customers and 35% were using social media to help them keep customers.

During some informal follow-up conversations with our resellers, we were told that despite their efforts, many of our resellers were waiting to see a return on this investment and that engaging in social media was akin to an eight year old thrown into a swimming pool, with an overzealous father believing that if he yelled “swim! swim!” loud enough, the child would somehow figure it out.

In worse cases, some staff dedicated to the role were complaining of burn-out out due to the sheer amount of realtime information they attempted to absorb while they separated the “wheat from the chaff”.

Like swimming, social media isn’t a one day, jump in the pool and go kind of proposition. But the good news is that Social media does have the shallow end equivalent of the swimming pool: “Listening”.

Using social media to effectively listen

One of the simplest ways to avoid social media burnout is to map out what you want to listen for and then build that into the tools your team is using. For example, a major segment of our wholesale reseller base are webhosts and ISPs (Internet Service Providers).

For webhosts and ISPs, identifying important search keywords like “cloud computing”, “control panel software”, “webhosting company”, “highspeed <citynamehere>” would all be relevant criteria since they would turn up conversations with people talking about these things.

Effective searching = effective listening. It’s not a set-it-and-forget it proposition, but by careful searching, it becomes far easier to find the conversations you’re looking for in order to engage more effectively.

The video below offers a beginning user a quick walkthrough that demonstrates how I use Twitter search, followed by adding these searches to Tweetdeck and Google Reader RSS. It’s saved me a lot of time over the years and I hope it will help you too.

Posted in General |