{"id":297,"date":"2007-06-11T13:16:41","date_gmt":"2007-06-11T17:16:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sarahdopp.com\/blog\/?p=297"},"modified":"2007-06-11T13:16:41","modified_gmt":"2007-06-11T17:16:41","slug":"verby-to-viral-new-trends-in-urls-and-marketing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/2007\/verby-to-viral-new-trends-in-urls-and-marketing\/","title":{"rendered":"Verby to Viral: New Trends in URLs and Marketing"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"juiz-outdated-message jodpm-top\">Heads up, this content is 19 years old. Please keep its age in mind while reading.<\/div><p>I commute to work on the MUNI (San Francisco&#8217;s municipal transit) and the BART (the bay area&#8217;s rapid transit), which means I see all the train station billboard ads.  I have to admit, of all the ads I see in a day, these tend to be the best.  And here&#8217;s a trend I&#8217;m seeing on the more successful ones: <strong>they include a new web address that starts with an action.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>For  example&#8230;<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.letsmeetatstarbucks.com\" target=\"_blank\">http:\/\/www.letsmeetatstarbucks.com<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.goruneasy.com\" target=\"_blank\">http:\/\/www.goruneasy.com<\/a><\/strong> (or <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cravethepain.com\" target=\"_blank\">http:\/\/www.cravethepain.com<\/a> )<\/li>\n<li><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.showmeriskier.com\" target=\"_blank\">http:\/\/www.showmeriskier.com<\/a><\/strong> (or <a href=\"http:\/\/www.showmesexier.com\" target=\"_blank\">http:\/\/www.showmesexier.com<\/a> or <a href=\"http:\/\/www.showmecrazier.com\" target=\"_blank\">http:\/\/www.showmecrazier.com<\/a> or a whole slew of others)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>And the common threads&#8230;<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>With the exception of the first one on this list, you can&#8217;t always tell exactly what company is being advertised by looking at the URL.<\/li>\n<li>The website is interactive and community-oriented.<\/li>\n<li>The website is NOT the official company website.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>And what are the benefits of this for the company?<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>There&#8217;s a good chance all the noun-based URLs they&#8217;d want to use are taken.  Verbs are the next frontier.<\/li>\n<li>By sending people to a campaign-specific website, they can monitor their campaign&#8217;s site traffic ROI without any confusion.<\/li>\n<li>They&#8217;re being hip and sexy.  Not everyone&#8217;s caught on to this strategy yet.  The curious are going to check it out.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>And what does this mean for the rest of us?<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>It&#8217;s okay to start using actions in your URLs.  Starbucks is doing it.  People will get it now.<\/li>\n<li> Domain name opportunists may want to start looking into likely action-based URLs related to big companies.  I misremembered &#8220;letsmeetatstarbucks&#8221; and instead tried <a href=\"http:\/\/meetmeatstarbucks.com\" target=\"_blank\">meetmeatstarbucks.com<\/a> .  It took me to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bixbymusic.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">http:\/\/www.bixbymusic.com<\/a>.  Nice work, guys.<\/li>\n<li>Billboard-to-web community-oriented marketing is being adapted with high visibility.  Web 2.0 marketers, <em><strong>raise your rates!<\/strong><\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Heads up, this content is 19 years old. Please keep its age in mind while reading.I commute to work on the MUNI (San Francisco&#8217;s municipal transit) and the BART (the bay area&#8217;s rapid transit), which means I see all the train station billboard ads. I have to admit, of all the ads I see in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36,46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-297","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-marketing","category-web_20"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=297"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}