A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about Best Buy’s television commercials advertising their Twelpforce, a group of Best Buy’s  technology experts who offer technical advice and support via Twitter. The most interesting thing about these commercials was that they weren’t directing visitors to their website, something which they control. Instead, they were directing people to the Twelpforce Twitter page, which is owned by Twitter.

While I don’t think there are going to be problems with Twitter, I just don’t think it’s a smart move to build the Twitter traffic rather than traffic to the main Best Buy site. They could conceivably redirect traffic from BestBuy.com/twelpforce to the Twitter page if they wanted to do so, allowing them to control the traffic and analytics rather than a third party.

Recently, I’ve been seeing commercials from TGI Fridays, encouraging people to go to a Facebook page they set up, Facebook.com/fanwoody. The commercial says that if 500,000 become Woody’s Fan, all will receive a coupon for a free burger at a TGI Fridays restaurant. The TGIF fan page has over 497,000 fans right now, and at the rate it seems to be going, they will hit the half a million mark in the next couple of hours.

Like Best Buy is doing with Twitter, TGI Fridays is driving traffic to Facebook rather than their home page. I still don’t understand or like the logic behind building another company’s brand.

You can learn quite a bit of information from public companies who must disclose just about every thing that could have an implication on the value of the company. Because of this, it’s a smart idea to follow the filings of various domain companies so you can read up on company filings, rather than rely on blogs and other news outlets who may or may not report on certain events/filings.

Some publicly traded companies that are required to make public filings that are related to the domain industry include the following (please let me know if I missed any company):

Google
Yahoo
Microsoft
Marchex
Top Level Domain Holdings
Tucows
Dark Blue Sea
Verisign
Banks.com

In order to follow these companies, I set up a stock portfolio in Yahoo specifically with domain industry related stocks. This allows me to see where they are trading as well as news reports and SEC (or other) filings. Don’t simply rely on others’ interpretations of news – and don’t get delayed news reports that fly under the radar (domain sales for example).

Follow these and other related companies and be more informed as a result.