J. Scott Evans is hands down the person to turn to on emerging domain and online IP law issues. He’s moderating a panel discussion with David Taylor of Hogan Lovells International, and Scot Minden of  Symantec.

Is a gTLD expensive compared to dot.com?
Taylor offered that generic terms as regular doamins have recently sold for high prices:

• Flowers.com: $1.5 million
• Vodka.com: $3 million
• Diamond.com: $5.5million

That’s a lot, considering the underlying registration costs $10 per year.

gTLDs for domains such as “.coke” require a $185,000 registration fee, and likely a .5M outlay for hosting. That’s still a long way from being cheap, and it potentially is a material burden on even large brand holders.

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A few weeks ago, I observed that part of a lawyers work involves dealing with misery: explosions, poisonings, fraud, catastrophic medical errors, and — toughest of all — kids whose lives will be framed by the careless act of another.

Those are the issues clients bring to us, and any lawyer who has done it for long enough gets to know the failings of systems that should protect us.

So I’m proud that my firm, Sokolove Law, is helping prevent some of those injuries before they ruin lives. We’re the first firm I know of to sponsor a viral video contest. It gets people to make video about the need to ban asbestos, which is still legal and causing cancer deaths that strike close to home. That’s right: the effort will prevent people from needing to become litigants. And I’m glad about that.

Just last week I was at a friend’s house for a party, and one of the guests recounted an asbestos threat from construction work in his office building in Boston. Everyone was told that if they found dust on their desks they should call special contractors on site who would show up with safety gear to take it away.

“Everyone knew it was asbestos,” he told me. You can imagine his family’s relief when he moved to a new office.

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Let’s face it: too many companies know they want all the buzzword benefits of social media, but they initiate without the strategy playbook that would help them win.

Arena vs. Playbook
Think of  social networks as the arenas for performance, with strategy as the playbook. In order to build an “at-scale revenue contributor for business,” digital marketers must step away from over-hyped new mediums and tools.  It’s time to stop asking “what” (as in “What’s our Foursquare strategy?” or “What’s our Klout score?”) and instead focus on “who” your audience is and “how” best to connect with them. That’s the playbook.

Everywhere and Nowhere at Once
The range of social media opportunities is an illusion.  I use services like Knowem to register brand names across hundreds of social sites. But there are thirty more networks to register on every month. The risk of overextension has never been greater for marketers.

Make Something Awesome for Your Audience
A creative idea, backed by brand and content strategy, is what we bring to our audience.  With the right human spark, social media can drive personal engagement.

But too many firms start with the message they want to deliver and a fixation on where they might say it. Without a positioning strategy, the result is  a succession of random efforts that go off track.  Social networks can work, but without strategy they can be totally ineffective.

The Social Media ROAD map
There are four phases for planning social media strategy that, together, create a method for social media initiation.

• Research your audience, competition, and the marketing conversation for entry points.
• Objectives drive your efforts, metrics gauge progress.
• Actions are framed by strategies that connect team roles to conversations and methods.
• Devices are the platforms that both the team and the audience use.
  (Keep reading to see why it is so easy let this one slip forward.)

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