Veteran California Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein has been a staunch activist against assault weapons throughout her tenure on Capitol Hill, but a domain name featuring her name will soon tell a different story. Dimitrios Karras, the CEO of the California gun parts and accessories store Ares Armor, registered SenatorFeinstein.com and will use the site to promote gun rights, reports The Daily Caller.

The basic page already features articles supporting gun rights and links to petitions to charge Feinstein with treason, but the headline suggests that more content is coming, reading "COMING SOON! Senator Feinstein's Biggest Fan Page!" Elsewhere on the site, Karras says "gun owners strike back," filling what he thought was a void for opponents of Feinstein whose comments on official Facebook pages were often scrutinized.

Karras calls the registration and counterintuitive use of Feinstein's name "funny" and "an entertaining thing," suggesting levity, but it's clear that the matter is important to him. His business is based on the firearms industry, and new legislation against assault weapons, as Feinstein has promised, could affect his livelihood.

Karras registered the page in early January, along with domain names related to other politicians, including California's other Senator, Democrat Barbara Boxer. Because he is using the site as a gripe site and not assuming Feinstein's likeness, he is within his legal rights in terms of domain name ownership, and he sees this as a way to bring attention to the issue and allow both sides to discuss the issues openly.

This, of course, is not the first time someone has used a politician's name to voice a contrarian point of view, but Karras's move is especially relevant given the increased attention that firearms legislation is receiving following a spate of gun violence in 2012. His ultimate vision for the site remains to be seen, but Feinstein could have avoided this situation by proactively registering this intuitive domain name.

We talk a lot about domain name sales, but what about actual name sales? One Florida man decided to link the two by auctioning his last name off to the highest bidder for a full year. Jason Sadler, who owns and operates a successful marketing firm through which companies pay him to wear their names and logos on t-shirts, took personal branding one step further when he sold his last name to Headsets.com for $45,500 for the year.

On January 1, he will legally change his name to Jason Headsets.com, a move that he has documented in detail on his website (where he also explains that he will donate a portion of the proceeds to charity). He hosted the auction and chronicled the process, which resulted in bids from 25 different companies, on BuyMyLastName.com. Ultimately, Headsets.com and PawnUp.com duked it out until the final moments of the auction, until the former won the bid.

Mike Faith, CEO of Headsets.com (which sells, you guessed it, headsets for telephones and other devices), explained to CNN Money that the decision to participate in the auction was an easy one. Calling the purchase a "one-year inexpensive gamble," he said that $45,000 is "not expensive for the marketing value," considering that Faith's company generates $30 million in sales each year.

The sale and the press it has already generated will surely result in additional visitors to the company’s website. The sale involves very little work for either party and is another example of creative marketing of domain names that could inspire similar stunt marketing by other firms.

 
Most observers probably consider Old Spice's "Believe in Your Smellf" ad campaign to be a success. In the patented Old Spice tradition kicked off by the “Man Your Man Could Smell Like” ads, these spots have driven buzz on social media and clocked millions of YouTube views. But if you consider the ad campaign from a domain policy perspective, there have been a number of missed opportunities to further capitalize on this buzz to drive consumer engagement.

The primary faux pas came on the part of Wieden+Kennedy, the ad agency behind the campaign. The agency owns the domains Smellf.com and BelieveInYourSmellf.com, but isn't doing anything with them. Wieden+Kennedy clearly took the time to acquire the domains, but neither one resolves to a working website.

On the most popular social media sites, the agency doesn't appear to own any handles related to “Believe in Your Smellf” or “Smellf.” The “Smellf” username across Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter is owned, closed, and suspended, respectively. “BelieveInYourSmellf” is too many characters to be a Twitter username, but is still available on both Facebook and YouTube.

Considering its pedigree and size, Old Spice’s parent company Proctor & Gamble should have a formal domain policy in place. The bottom line is that Proctor & Gamble should own the domains associated with its product's ad campaign, and in this situation, they do not. A formal domain policy would help the company avoid situations like this, increase efficiency, and help Proctor & Gamble take all of the opportunities that this campaign presents. Should the company stop working with Wieden+Kennedy, it should make sure that it has the domain names in its own name.

Another issue is the non-use of the aforementioned domain names. Ideally, the sites would host content related to the "Believe in Your Smellf" campaign, but they should, at the very least, redirect to OldSpice.com. Social media pages should follow the same guidelines. YouTube.com/OldSpice is a popular, active channel, and if Proctor & Gamble doesn't want to divert traffic from that page, it should simply redirect YouTube.com/Smellf, which comes up as a "closed" page.

All companies should have an established, formal domain policy to prevent situations like this one. In order to protect their trademarks and brand reputations, companies must ensure that they own all relevant domains. Otherwise, they are susceptible to both cybersquatting and missed opportunities for both consumer engagement and customer conversion.
 

Today, FairWinds released an update to its 2008 Verizon Case Study. Back in 2008, we projected that our work to improve Verizon’s domain name portfolio would drive over 3 million visitors to the company’s websites and save Verizon over $1 million.

After revisiting the data this year, it turns out that those original projections were a bit low. In reality, we helped Verizon attract over 93 million visitors to its sites over the first three years (that’s an average of 31 million visitors per year), and drive an additional 321,000 online sales annually, which translate into millions of dollars in revenue for Verizon.

How did we do it? We took a three-pronged approach to make Verizon’s domain name portfolio as lean and efficient as possible. First, we cut out all the low-quality domains that were costing Verizon money but not driving visitors or otherwise contributing to its business. Then, we identified and recovered key domain names that the company did not already own. Finally, we helped the company redirect its domain names to the relevant content that users expect to find when they type those domains into their browsers.

But the best part of the work we did with Verizon was helping to change the company’s approach toward its domain name portfolio. Verizon regularly evaluates its portfolio to make sure that it is not carrying dead weight, and approaches the registration of new domains with a critical eye, always asking whether the domain will improve its online business. Ultimately, Verizon is able to provide its audience with safer online experiences that deliver relevant content, and increased its revenue in the process.