A couple of Ad campaigns caught my eye over the weekend.
The first is for something you will be hearing a lot about over the next few weeks, a new movie about the founders of Facebook entitled “The Social Network” which opens October 1.
This movie is going to increase exposure for Facebook and for the net.
Yes “everyone” seems to be on Facebook and the net but they are not, yet.
For all of ways the Internet has changed the world there has hardly been a whisper out of Hollywood.
Think about it.
How many movies have you seen or heard of about the Internet and specifically stories of the major successes behind it?
The Bill Gates/Steve Jobs story had to share one measly made for TV movie, “Pirates of Silicon Valley” and that was way back in 1999.
No movies have yet to cover the founders of Google despite being one of the greatest success stories on earth.
So anytime Hollywood is going to talk Internet I think its a big deal.
On the domain front, the official site for the movie is thesocialnetwork-movie.com.
Its not that Sony doesn’t own thesocialnetworkmovie.com, it does, but that domain doesn’t even forward to thesocialnetwork-movie.com.
Instead the domain without the hyphen goes to Sonypictures.com.
Strange no?
I don’t get it.
If you own a domain with a hyphen and the same domain without it, why not market the one without the hyphen? and why not direct both to the same site?
The website listed in the trailer is a completely different domain, 500millionfriends.com, but that domain redirects to thesocialnetwork-movie.com
Of course by the time the movie comes out on DVD, Facebook will have at least 600 million friends, which will make the domain outdated (no Sony doesn’t own the domain 600millionfriends.com)
I always thought a shorter domain was better but I guess Sony disagrees.
In case your wondering thesocialnetwork.com goes to a dating site for people in Chicago.
It should be interesting to see how much of a bump that website gets in traffic now that the marketing for the movie is gearing up.
For the record according to Compete that domain currently gets 1,367 visitors a month for August.
Another ad I saw this weekend suprised me was for CircleK.
Although CircleK owns CircleK.com the ad I saw during a football game was for CircleKaz.com.
That goes to one of CircleK regional sites (who knew) for Arizona.
Seems that CircleK owns 8 regional sites that they promote Independently of their main site at CircleK.com of including CirclekFlorida.com, CircleKSoutheast.com and CircleKgulfcoast.com
I personally don’t understand the strategy of having 8 regional sites which you market individually rather than market a national site and have people click on the state they live.
That seems so 1990′ or at least back to the time that the last movie about the Internet came out.
With domain names are getting harder and harder to get, they have to go for other available domains which are not registered, and also the website is only for promoting the movie so the domain name is not so important in the place as long as people type in the correct one, but I won’t be surprise that people will try typing the thesocialnetwork.com just for curiosity sake, anyway waiting for the movie to come to the big screen and hope it’s a good one.
Toh
Toh
In any case I see no reason to market a domain with a hyphen when you own the one without it
@MHB
On the domain front, the official site for the movie is thesocialnetwork-movie.com.
Its not that Sony doesn’t own thesocialnetworkmovie.com, it does, but that domain doesn’t even forward to thesocialnetwork-movie.com.
Instead the domain without the hyphen goes to Sonypictures.com.
Strange no?
=======================================
No, not strange at all.
The new DNSMASQ++ maps DOMAIN.MOVIE to DOMAIN-MOVIE.COM
To MHB:
With a hyphen or without a hyphen doesn’t really matter much for the visitors, I think they just happen to choose the one with the hyphen to promote and use the one without to direct them to their homepage just in case someone didn’t type the hyphen, it’s a win-win 😉
P.S. thesocialnetwork-movie.com looks clearer than thesocialnetworkmovie.com when you put it in print for offline advertisement.
Toh
Sounds like someone in the old marketing department got put in charge of delegating domains for this. They can be spectacularly clueless.
Here is an interesting note. SKGOLD web hosting puts .CO above .COM in their name registration field. Here it is:
https://www.skgoldhosting.com/web-hosting-clients/cart.php?a=add&domain=register
This is exactly the correct position that .CO commands. More to come.
Ls Morgan, you will be getting a deposition letter this week. In big trouble.
re: CircleK
Using one of the regional domains gives them a definitive measure of the ad response perhaps.
.
rumors say that also Google will have its Movie
so, I should make (lots of?) money with the visits to my google-movie-related domains/sites… 🙂
in the mean time, it seems that the super domain/site eBook.com is on sale
the-digital-reader.com/2010/09/20/ebook-com-domain-up-for-sale/
.
Hollywood is always great with movie titles, but terrible with domain names.
I’m not sure CirckleK has a strategy for the web. Regional sites, especially if hosted on unique servers, have SEO benefit from interlinking to each other. The sites also represent the stores, people and events in that area; BestBuy does this as well.