I just listened to a report on NPR where a Clinton, Illinois florist named Judy Van Fossan, has been receiving hundreds of calls a day from people inquiring about the GM rebate program after the company began advertising a national toll-free cash-for-clunkers toll-free number that's nearly identical to the shop's toll-free number.

The floral shop's number is:
1-800-CARS-654
GM is using:
1-877-CARS-654

The florist is required to pay a fee for each toll-free call that comes into the store and Van Fossan said she could be hit with a massive phone bill at the end of the month.

This proves that people, by their very nature, are habitual creatures and still resort (possibly subconsciously or through motor memory) to what they are most familiar with doing. I think callers just assumed a company the size of GM or the government would be using an 800 number...

So I have three questions to all of you 'domainers' out there. The first is directed towards those of you who are currently investing heavily in the development on non .com TLDs. How much traffic do you think you'll be handing out to the .com version of your venture?

Question number two is, If you found yourself in similar shoes as the florist, getting all of those "clunker" phone calls, how would you creatively leverage that kinda traffic? I'd do something with it or hope to sell the number to GM.

Which brings me to my final question. Do you think GM bares any responsibility in compensation to the florist for what will more than likely snowball into a sizable and much higher than normal business phone expense for her? Or are these charges something that ATT (or whoever is the florist's toll free provider) should wave as a special circumstance and simply not charge the florist for. I doubt that will happen. Wonder if GM will make her an offer for the number. I doubt that too. So what would you do?

BTW - Remember how the Utube.com site (a pipe company) got all of the YouTube.com traffic when Google bought them? I think they filed a law suit against Youtube for crashing their servers and for making their hosting costs skyrocket.  Check out the site now, they wisely monetized the traffic. Not sure how the suit turned out though.

Till next time... stay creative with what falls from the sky.

Jamie Parks
LIVEdomainer.com

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