Dear SnapNames customer:

I’m contacting you today to inform you of an unfortunate incident at SnapNames, and to let you know what the company is doing to address it.

Recently, SnapNames discovered that an employee had set up an account on the SnapNames system under a false name and, under this name, bid in SnapNames auctions. This is a clear violation of our internal policy and was not approved by the company. We deeply regret that this conduct has impacted our customers.

Extent of impact

This conduct affected a small percentage of SnapNames auctions:
* Bidding affected approximately five percent of total SnapNames auctions since 2005, most of which occurred between 2005 and 2007.
* The incremental revenue from the bidding represented approximately one percent of SnapNames’ auction revenue since 2005.

No matter the level of impact, SnapNames takes this matter extremely seriously. When the matter was discovered, the company immediately closed the account in question and began a thorough investigation. The employee has also been dismissed from the company.

SnapNames further discovered that, on certain recent and limited occasions, when the employee won an auction, the employee secretly arranged to refund from SnapNames to the fictitious account a portion of the winning bid amount.

Remedy to affected customers

Though on some occasions the employee won the auction, in many instances the bidding caused the ultimate auction winner to pay more for a name than had the employee not participated in the auction.

SnapNames neither condones this conduct nor wants to be perceived as benefiting from the conduct. Accordingly, we have decided that regardless of the circumstance, in every auction where the employee’s fictitious account submitted a bid which resulted in a higher price being paid by the winning bidder, SnapNames will offer a rebate, with 5.22% interest (the highest applicable federal rate during the affected time period), to affected customers for the difference between the prices they actually paid and the prices they would have paid, had the employee not bid in the auctions. The rebate will be available in cash or in credit on the SnapNames platform, at your discretion.

SnapNames has moved quickly to address this situation. The company has retained Rust Consulting, an independent third party, who will administer the rebate offer. Within the next week, Rust Consulting will contact affected customers to provide details regarding the offer.

Your business and ongoing relationship are important to us and we can assure you that we have taken all necessary steps to ensure the integrity of the platform and reinforced controls and procedures to avoid any possibility of further breach. These include:

* Enhanced monitoring of bidding activity for suspect behavior
* Additional controls over financial transactions
* Specific domain name registration policies for employees

In the meantime, if you have any questions, you may consult the FAQs here, or contact the SnapNames support team: By e-mail: support@snapnames.com Phone: +1 (866) 690-6279 (toll-free in the U.S.) +1 (503) 241-8547 (outside the U.S.)

SnapNames, and all in the Oversee family of companies, are deeply disappointed with this incident. Since its founding in 2000, SnapNames has been committed to the principles of fairness and trust; the company wants to assure customers—through both words and actions—that it remains committed to those principles.

Thank you again for your business, and for your ongoing trust in SnapNames.

Sincerely,

Jeff Kupietzky Craig Snyder President and CEO General Manager,

SnapNames.com SnapNames 1600 SW 4th Avenue,
Suite 400 Portland, OR 97201

Article published in Submit Suite Blog.

Can we still trust Snapnames?

He has also the reputation of not telling the whole side of the story. Because of the nature of his job he is probably forced to keep away from our ears some “details”. Bellow you can find some of the interviews and Q&A sessions with Matt Cutts.

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Article published in Submit Suite Blog.

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Press Release Submitter has a database which is already used in our press release distribution service. At the moment we have 15.000 media contacts from US, later we will add also German, Spanish, French and Romanian media contacts.

The application will be easy to use, in the line of Article Submitter or Website Submitter. Some of functionalities will be:

1. language detection and spam filter (a press release in German canot be send to a english contact)
2. the possibility to filter the media contacts based on complex selections, categories, TV, radio, magazines etc
3. The PR sending is done using SMTP ( support + SSL), with defined delay time between sending
4. Editing capabilities for the database of media contacts (import, blocking contacts etc)

Here are bellow 2 images with Press Release Submitter (eta 01.07.2009, the estimation price will be 279$ ).

Article published in Submit Suite Blog.

First news about Press Release Submitter

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The small ebook is produced in partnership with Microsoft Office Live Small Business and is aimed to small businesses. The book touches the following themes: What is Social Media?, Case Study: They don’t use social media in my industry, Blogging“ The front door to social media, Case Study: Blogging Customer Stories, RSS , Social search, Social bookmarking, Social networks.

I will quote also the author conclusion:

As you can see, when technology is leveraged to facilitate and enhance social interaction, a great deal of value can be created. But tread carefully. This savvy audience can be turned off if approached in the wrong way. Use these new tools properly and they’ll prove to be invaluable in your effort to strengthen existing customer relationships and capture the hearts and minds of new consumers.

The ebook is free to download.

Article published in Submit Suite Blog.

Free eBook TALK Social Media for Small Business

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The Long Tail is the phenomenon that the sum of less frequent searches is greater than the sum of the top searches. The tail are the niche products, individually unimportant, but collectively significant.

One example of this is the theory’s prediction that demand for products not available in traditional bricks and mortar stores is potentially as big as for those that are. But the same is true for video not available on broadcast TV on any given day, and songs not played on radio. In other words, the potential aggregate size of the many small markets in goods that don’t individually sell well enough for traditional retail and broadcast distribution may someday rival that of the existing large market in goods that do cross that economic bar.

Long Tails everywhere?

The Long Tail is one of those business books that, ironically, deserves more than a niche readership. Anderson encourage others to see Long Tails everywhere, so my vision of “Long Tail of Searches” and “Long Tail of Online Marketing” is illustrated in the bellow charts.

Listen to the podcast with Chris Anderson talking about the ideas in his new book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More.

Article published in Submit Suite Blog.

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All the the relations between you and your customer must be seen as a conversation, not only blasting a message at them. This is the best message you as a service provider should learn from this book. I proud myself to follow Lois advice regarding the development of our applications, we use the ideas expressed in forum posts and per email (we receive around 100 emails per day only with suggestions and new directories suggestions).

But there is always place for improvement and some of the techniques described will be used in our next campaignes. The book is to be found on Amazon and is a catch for cutting-edge marketing innovation readers.

Listen to the podcast: How is conversational marketing different – and better – than word-of-mouth marketing?

Article published in Submit Suite Blog.

Beyond Buzz-The Next Generation of Word-of-Mouth Marketing

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My thoughts about the data I am about to present to you:

1. in 29 January Yahoo! Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2007 Financial Results which are beyond the expectations. Still from the charts bellow I see quite a drastic decrease in the number of searches which will affect for sure also the paid advertising.

2. Google is still the king of searches regarding the number of delivered search results. A slow but clear increase in searches is to be observed.

3. Microsoft, oscillating from one month to another, stealing from Ask and Yahoo share of searching, is still to be consider as a potential next big Google IF a Yahoo! purchase will be done.

Comscore 2007 share of searches:

Comscore 2007 share of searches evolution:

Nielsen 2007 share of searches:

Nielsen 2007 share of searches evolution:

Article published in Submit Suite Blog.

Search Engine Trends And Share Of Searches In 2007

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Article published in Submit Suite Blog.

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