The ICANN Generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) application window opened on January 12th and I was glad to be part of one of the first teams to apply. That’s right, Neustar is applying for .neustar—our own brand—because we believe that our own gTLD provides us the opportunity to increase awareness of Neustar as a leader in real-time information and analytics.

We’re getting a lot of excitement in our marketing teams about how we might use the domain. For example, we can create service-specific domains like dns.neustar or siteprotect.neustar. We can also create themed domains like security.neustar and neutrality.neustar or even domains for each of our employees. The possibilities are endless.

When creating the application, I used the Neustar Application Prep Guide—the same one our customers are using, by the way—and found that it really helped. I have our team working on all the ICANN application questions using that guidebook and it’s made our process significantly shorter.

One hint that I have is in the creation of contact emails. It’s really important to have the right people in your organization serve as your contacts during the application process. If there are any questions or concerns, it’s best to get them cleared up quickly. We wouldn’t want to lose our application because of a communications breakdown.

I recommend making the secondary contact email a distribution list. We created one on our Exchange server so that several people get copied if we get an email from ICANN. That way, even if somebody is out on vacation, we can rest assured that the questions are received and acted on quickly.

We’ll keep you posted on the progress of our application and any other tips we have for a smooth filing. In the meantime, our friends at dotYOU have a great resource for companies interested in applying for a gTLD.

Written by Mark Pilipczuk is vice president of Corporate Marketing & Communications at Neustar.