Dot what?
30/10 2009
When it comes to digital brand management one element that is often over looked and abused is the URL. If you have never been to a leading brands website before, chances are that you will most probably try to guess the URL via a combination of brand name and locality, for example www.brand.com or www.brand.se. If that did not take you to the site you were after, then it is over to Google. For less well know brands Google might well be the first point of call. This is even the case for returning visitors. People will often try to guess the site name instead of using a bookmark or their browser’s history list. Therefore developing a clear and simple URL strategy for your brand is a must.
The dot com problem
For leading brands placing a dot com at the end of your brand has become the standard and most desired domain to acquire. The problem now is when the major brands have localized their web presence, without taking real consideration for how they treat their dot com’s. Take a look around at a range of leading brands dot com sites and I am sure you will find that the majority of them fall into one of these three categories:
1. A filter page asking you what country you are in and what language you speak.
2. Confusing mess of corporate/investor/consumer information.
3. A North American version of the site.
This issue is compounded even more when a brand stretches across a range of services.
Please sniff me
Sony is doing a better job of controlling whom they send where and what they put where. If you type in www.sony.com then you are taken to, admittedly, a boring page, but look again. Sony are obviously doing the same as apple, by retaining their dot com address for their north American audience. But they have gone one-step further and implemented IP sniffer technology, which means they are able to tell that I am surfing to their site from Sweden. So they ask me, in both Swedish and English, if I want to go to my regional site (which of course is www.sony.se) or continue to the American version. They also managed to treat their global corporate and investor information in a clean manner by placing all such information under the www.sony.net domain.
Sony could improve the design of this dot com landing page, but nonetheless adding this a simple function shows that Sony understands the issues.
Whatadowedowithourcampaignsites.com
Another issue is what URL to use when launching a campaign? There is no right or wrong decision to be made here. www.mybrand.com/campaigntitle or www.campaigntitle.se the choice depends on the campaigns purpose, media placement plus a range of other factors. However whichever route you take it should be based on a solid URL strategy. It is all to convenient to place a campaign on its own URL but the results of that can be ineffective if the wider picture is on your main site.
Social shorts
Further confusion of a brands URL is now taking place though the shortening of URL’s to recommend sites in the social media. One of more popular of these services is Bit.ly who, being a purely digital company, have seamlessly integrated their brand and URL by using Libya’s country domain suffix ‘.ly’. On a typical day Bit.ly is used to create 5 to 7 million shortened URLs each day, and it handles 25 million requests to expand them.
The data that can be accessed from bit.ly and other services like it is fast becoming and gold mine of measurability and search. However URL shorteners add a new step to the process of retrieving a web page. Even clicking on a regular URL involves a leap of faith. Not being able to see the true URL destination, because it’s hidden in a shorter encoded URL, makes that leap even longer. More and more people are turning from Google and Yahoo to search the social web for real-time information, and as this happens the challenge is going to be to connect people to the websites they want to reach and keeping their clicks out of the hands of spammers and phishes.
Get it right
A clear URL strategy is a must for all brands large or small, the larger the brand the clearer it must be. The general guidelines are, if your site uses English and is international in its content and user base, get a ‘.com’ domain. If your site uses any other language, use the appropriate country domain. If your site has local appeal, covers mainly local issues, or sells mainly local products, use the country domain no matter what language is used on the site. Spread the information, make use of the variety of domain names that are available, you don’t need to place it all under one domain. Failure to follow these guidelines could have you relying more on Google than you would like to.
As I write this, plans to allow people who use the non-Latin languages to enter web addresses in their own language are being made. It is likely the majority of first non-Latin net addresses to be approved will be in Chinese, Arabic and Cyrillic scripts. This will be the biggest change to the way the Internet works since it was created 40 years ago
Finally, the social web is forcing brands to be more ubiquitous and become part of the conversation rather than requested media. This may well mean that over time the importance of a simple and clear URL might be diminished. I would argue that ubiquity only increases the need to make the church of the brand even easier to find.
Steinar Danielsen
Steinar Danielsen is the co-founder and Creative Director of Supernative, a digital communication agency based in Stockholm. He works with providing analysis, online strategies, creative concepts and digital identities, for a range of international brands.