Last night I watched the closing ceremonies for the Vancouver 2010 winter Olympics and one of the traditions is the passing of the torch to the next hosting country. There was a pretty large presentation for the 2014 Olympics which will be held in Sochi Russia.

Not only did Russia display the 2014 logo for the games which includes the domain name Sochi.ru, they wisely displayed Sochi.ru by itself which is the Domain Name they are using for the website about the 2014 games in Russia! They had Sochi.ru displayed on jackets and the domain name was widely used during the video presentation itself.

Sochi.ru 2014 Winter Olympics

This was extremely smart on behalf of Russia to display its domain name. It gives interested people a place to go to find out more information! A direct address!

Sochi ~ just by itself doesn’t really mean more than the "location" of the next winter Olympics

Sochi.ru ~ displayed gives somebody the "location" to find out more about the next winter Olympics in 2014 directly!

The problem? Outside of Russia, it is very likely that not that many people were even aware that Sochi.ru was a domain name! If the domain name was Sochi.com, people easily would of been able to tell it was a domain name and a location that they could visit on the web. The .ru at the end of Sochi is actually called a ccTLD. cc = Country Code + TLD = Top Level Domain. Country Code Top Level Domain Name.

The United States also has a ccTLD in the form of .us, Canada is .ca etc. but the vast majority of people do not instantly associate .us, .ca or .ru or most ccTLD’s as a domain name. It is one big downfall when marketing with a ccTLD to the mass public.

With the .com TLD heavily marketed world wide, it has become easily associated with the internet and easily allows for people to put two and two together that they can easily visit the site on the internet. Although Russia did an outstanding job promoting its website during the closing ceremonies for the 2010 Olympic games, it is very likely that most that saw Sochi.ru had no clue it was actually a web address.

I personally would have tried to use Sochi.com if they could of purchased it and marketed with that domain name due to the world wide recognition of it being a domain name. You can then market on a more personal level using a ccTLD directly in Russia using Sochi.ru .

All in all, it was a great job promoting the Sochi.ru domain name, I just hope for there sake that people were aware it was a domain name.