–Dan Kelly, Attorney
I’ve been catching up on some backed-up blog reading and came across this interesting post dated April 30, 2010 from our friends at The FairWinds Blog at DomainNameStrategy.com. It relates the story of the Georgetown Safeway, know to locals as “Social Safeway.” As Liz Sweezey writes:
The store earned the affectionate nickname “Social Safeway” many years ago, because it has always been and will continue to be a place where locals are bound to run into someone they know. Going grocery shopping is a social outing.
Her post details that the store promoted itself with banners directing locals to “socialsafeway.com” during a recent year-long closure for remodeling. She relates that the idea for the dedicated and unique domain name met with some corporate resistance, but that it was an ultimate success in grassroots marketing.
Fast-forward to today, when it appears that neither socialsafeway.com nor georgetownsafeway.com resolves to any functional websites. I’m dying to know why not–both domains seemed like winners to me, but it looks like some business reason or other has shelved this project (and perhaps only temporarily, as Safeway still owns socialsafeway.com, along with some 140 other domain names). We may yet see this big chain adopt a local marketing strategy on the Internet.