Domain Help

uncle-samI’ve been courting a domain for a while now, it expires in February, I’ve read countless articles on the subject but sadly there’s a good chance that the company will probably renew it making this blog post somewhat redundant.

However, my situation is a little different and I’m hoping because of this that I might stand a better chance of getting somewhere than I would with other domains. The company are based in New York, they are quite big, I’ve wrote to them several times using their “webmaster” email link with no response, I’ve contacted them on twitter with no response and I recently called up their office and after being put on hold for twenty minutes I was told that nobody could really help me, they didn’t even know who handled all their web stuff.

A little background check on the domain told me that it was first registered in 1995 and was held by a company until they were bought over. Since the buyout the domain has been forwarded onto an exisiting page within the companies site. However after visiting this page a few times something struck me, something was very peculiar about the page, then it hit me. Not once does the page in question make reference to the old company, no mention of the old URL, no mention of the company name. There isn’t anything to show the relationship between the old company and the new one? Surely the buyer had deemed the company a rival or something that had shown a good deal of promise and therefore decided to go ahead with a buyout? If this was indeed the case, then surely you would make to maximise your sales and let others know of your affiliation?

As my desired address was taken, I naturally looked at the other options but unfortunately .co.uk, .net and .org have all been taken too. However something that worries me is that the .co.uk address is held by another relatively large company. The reason for writing this post is because I want to get in their first, beating the other people who might be having similar thoughts. It also doesn’t help that the company who helped design the .co.uk are pretty big players and will have a better idea of how to go about things like this.

I need your help, what would you do in a situation like this? Have you ever dealt with anything like this before and if so, have you been successful? What tactics did you employee to get your domain? Should I bypass the “webmaster” who is obviously incapable of doing their job and go straight to the top and explain my situation and their poor customer service? Does the fact that they don’t reference the URL anywhere perhaps put me in a good position?