Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

Jay, thanks for taking the time to respond and for your feedback. I agree that on the surface, a contact page has many of the same features, but unlike a web page or blog a .TEL goes into an address book once and remains updated for life.

Let’s say I’m a business contact and you give me your .TEL (say jrh.tel). I enter jhr.tel in my Blackberry once and all your contact information is automatically downloaded. Then I can simply “Call Jay”, “Email Jay”, "Visit Jay's Site", “Locate Jay”, “Message Jay”, etc. It doesn’t matter to me how often you change your e-mail address or phone number, because it’s automatically refreshed in my address book every time you update your information.

From a consultant-client perspective, your relationship with me has become a bit more sticky - I have more information than I would have transcribed from your business card and it's up to date for life. Unlike your competition who asked me to go to their blog page/web page/transcribe their business card, you gave me three characters to type in for one-click access to you, together with the promise that your contact information will never be stale. You made my life a little bit easier.

Your privacy settings also protected you. Because I’m a client, I get information like your work e-mail, work number, corporate blog, corporate website, etc. Your family and friends might get to see your home number, cell, personal social sites, etc. Any time you join a new community, it automatically updates for them. You assign people to privacy groups that determine what they can see via a friending process, just like Facebook or Linked in. (It's unfortunate you can't just give your FB/LI account to someone and have them pop it in their cell phone for maintained access to your contact info.)

For certain types of business, one marketing tactic might be to have a private field called promotions, only available to customers and prospects that submit a friending request. Perhaps this offers 20% off a particular product or service this week, but just like updating your telephone number, the promotion can be updated daily/weekly, effectively creating a direct feed to every customer.

Anyway, I apologize for the long reply, but it’s not immediately clear from many sources about the distinctions between a simple contact page and the technology and infrastructure that sits behind the TEL name.

I also agree about the price at the moment, but on March 23rd, the Landrush period will finish and from March 24th, prices look to be around $20/year.

@WMMA: Thanks, these are really great interpolations of where the technology could realistically go and we're certainly beginning to see more and more geospatial opportunities linked to personal space and commercial possibilities. [Off topic, but it will be interesting to see public reaction to Google Latitude.]

If I understand your second point correctly, you seem to be saying that marketing can't work miracles for a poor product and I agree. To add just a bit more focus, I want to know at what point marketing gets into the fray with respect to a new technology: starts to challenge it, formulate strategies and advise clients. To this put it in another context, how long did marketing professionals wait before engaging with emerging technologies like the web or email and more recently Facebook and Twitter? If .TEL turns out to be as significant as these, is it normal that at this stage in the technology’s development, marketing should be so quiet? Or should the silence from the marketing sector be read as a sign that the technology has a questionable future?

@ASVP/ChrisB: Plaxo is definitely the closest living relative to .TEL. Carve off the initial Plaxo contact idea; supercharge it with a robust technology infrastructure; enable it to be integrated with any internet software or hardware; and give it a 'handle' that can easily be passed from person to person and you have a reasonably close approximation of .TEL

Matthew & Trinity, thanks for the constructive comments.

Matthew, we are on exactly the same page and while I recognise you are arguing against the .TEL as a domain extension, the benefits and behaviour you describe are exactly the arguments I use in favour of the .TEL.

Like you, I’m interested in the connection outcome: dial matthew, e-mail matthew, message matthew, locate matthew, etc. The underlying details of the phone number, email address ip address, etc, serve only to impede my goal. All I want to do is connect.

The single biggest problem with .TEL is that it’s a domain name, so people get caught up in the traditional domain name arguments, instead of looking at the benefits that this new use of domain technology is offering (exactly the benefits you describe, if I’ve understood you properly). If you described the .TEL in terms of what it does, no one on earth would call this thing a domain name. It shares no superficial characteristics of a traditional domain extension.

Paradoxically, the fact that it is a domain name is also the one of the keys to its potential success. It’s built on the DNS, proven over 20 years of use. It won’t go down like a web site – the DNS is a propagated system, mirrored on machines across the internet [albeit if the root servers go down and TTLs expire, there would be an issue, but that’s no more likely than the .COM root servers going down and every .COM ceasing to resolve ]. And it provides a “handle” (the name itself) that allows it to be easily passed around.

I agree with the comments that both you and Trinity on the issues about .mobi and other TLD extensions. Personally I never understood why anyone would need a .mobi (other than for defensive reasons), when you can simply make a mobile/wap compliant site. I can also understand the augments and concerns that people have about plans to allow anyone to sponsor a Top Level Domain. While this may work for very large organizations like IBM who may want their own TLD, other potential TLDs simply force brand conscious organizations into defensive purchases.

My final note would be to reiterate that TEL is not a domain name in the traditional sense. Its ability to escape its own technological pedigree may not come until TEL gets picked up by the Telcos and offered along side your telephone number with your next mobile plan. As someone that started with largely similar opinions and concerns as some of those expressed here, I’d urge you to take another look and see beyond the smokescreen of the domain label. I honestly believe that within a few years, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, etc will go the way of IP addresses and simply become part of the technology infrastructure, rather than something we need to remember.

In any event, I want to thank everyone who answered. Marketing Profs is a great site and you have a great group of members. A forum for more open ended debate would be a great addition, but in the meantime, I look forward to following the many interesting questions and responses that happen in this “exchange”.

All the best


Matt