Telnic, .tel domains & the small business namespace

I don’t know about you, but every time a new top level domain (the bit after the dot in your web address also known as a TLD) is released, I feel like someone’s pointing a gun at my head.

Just when you thought you’d secured your brand, small business or startup presence online by buying up the .com and .co.uk versions of your domain name, all of sudden someone comes up with .biz, .tv, .mobi, .net or the latest, .tel.

It’s as if the companies behind TLD bloat are saying: buy this new domain now before some squatter or adsense splogger grabs it and trashes your brand, your trademark or your business online.

And that’s exactly what seems to drive demand and create a ‘new gold rush’ in the domain name market – fear.

Add to this the confusion which liberalisation of domain names in 2010 is bound to cause and protecting your business ‘name’ on the internet or mobile all begins to look very messy, not to say expensive.

Telnic and .tel – more of the same?

So when I received a call from someone representing Telnic, the company behind .tel domains, extolling their benefits to small businesses, I was more than a little sceptical.

Interestingly though .tel isn’t just another domain name – Telnic really has innovated.

A .tel domain, which will cost you around £12 a year, allows you to put your business or personal contact details encrypted on servers at the heart of the internet known as the DNS (domain name servers) and make them visible online and accessible quickly and easily on smart phones. So what are the benefits?

A .tel page which allows you to keep your contact details online in a simple .tel template held on domain name servers.

Telnic claims this helps non-tech savvy small businesses get a presence online, assists in SEO (search engine optimisation) through easily updateable keywords and thereby discoverability, creates a distributed global business directory and is very fast, particularly on mobile platforms.

Most of these benefits are highly debatable when it comes to what SMEs want.

Small business benefits of .tel?

Let’s consider web presence, SEO and discoverability. The simple html and javascript template (see above) which creates the .tel web presence is certainly a one-stop-shop for your business contact details and a few keywords, but it’s not much more.

Although friendly to search engine spiders because it’s so simple, the page is very unlikely to appear high in search results other than for your name or the name of your business. And surely you’d want your own website in that position?

Most small businesses online want to be discovered ahead of their competition locally or nationally for more general searches e.g. ‘glasgow plumber’ perhaps.

Making it easy for people who already know your business to find your contact details is fine, but it’s hardly discoverability or a source of new punters.

The keyword ‘benefits’ are also largely irrelevant because search engines look for fresh, relevant content and reputation in terms of in-bound links, something these pages are unlikely to attract.

As for speed, well such simple web pages load rapidly – in less than a second – but the benefit is hardly perceptible compared to well-designed ordinary websites.

If .tel, and it’s a big if, becomes the equivalent of a global business directory online, your business will be competing against thousands of others in the same category.

And because of the lack of information on the .tel pages, it’s going to offer no perceivable benefit in terms of differentiation. No more certainly than you’d get from being listed for free in a directory like Yell.com or FreeIndex.co.uk.

Bye, bye address book?

But in a couple of areas Telnic may be on to something, although they face a catch-22 as do their potential customers.

Browsing the web on mobile phones has seen massive growth as smartphones proliferate. Telnic’s .tel domains make your contact details easily accessible and also dialable on the move.

But then Facebook, Gmail contacts, and Plaxo do this too and Apple’s iPhone allows you to dial numbers on websites by clicking on them straight on the phone’s mobile browser.

What differentiates .tel is the possibility of synchronising contact details as they’re updated by your contact, not you. Always having up-to-date details for business contacts that you no longer have to update yourself is a big potential plus.

I’m a name, not a number

The catch-22 is that this service only becomes really useful, if .tel becomes ubiquitous and you and all your business contacts are using it.

But ubiquity is tough. To that extent .tel is competing against free services like Twitter and Facebook to become a definitive ‘namespace’ for people and businesses.

What’s a namespace? Well rather than everybody having a telephone number, it’s everybody having a universally accepted digital ‘name/home’. An easy to remember ‘handle’ that every man, woman and child recognises.  One click and you’re in touch, online or on the move.

Twitter with its @ symbol and Facebook profiles have come the closest to achieving this so far. Both companies have millions and millions of people on their platforms, with ambitions to grow to 1 billion users.

Your hairdresser knows about Twitter and Facebook. Your hairdresser probably uses Twitter and Facebook. The day your hairdresser asks you, ‘what’s your .tel’ will be the day Telnic is dreaming of.

As the company’s head of communications, Justin Hayward, said to me last week:

We’re certainly aiming for our Hoover moment.

The moment when .tel becomes a generic term, a verb or a universally accepted ‘namespace’.

It may be a long wait.

Alex is the founder and editor of SmallBizPod, the UK's first podcast dedicated to small business, start-ups and entrepreneurship. Alex writes about topical small business issues, entrepreneurs and anything else that catches his eye here on the small business blog. http://www.smallbizpod.co.uk