Lorraine Stickley is a director of strategic communications at Verisign with more than 15 years of experience in corporate communications, digital marketing and social media. Her passion lies in telling a story, which she has done throughout her career helping companies in the technology, entertainment and education fields to increase audience engagement and build brand relevance.
At Verisign, Lorraine has played multiple roles within marketing. She first joined Verisign in 2012 as part of the internal communications team. In this role, her team’s work on the “Powered by You” employee brand ambassador program won the International Association of Business Communicators 2014 Silver Quill Award of Merit. Lorraine’s expertise in crafting engaging content led to her transition to the creative services function, working to produce campaign materials for global brand initiatives. In 2015, she moved to corporate communications, helping to develop a global content marketing strategy and assuming the role of corporate blog manager.
Prior to Verisign, Lorraine worked at ARIA Resort & Casino and Bellagio Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, managing employee communications and programming for more than 10,000 employees respectively. Her employee magazine, the CityCenter Insider, won Best Employee Publication from the American Gaming Association in 2010.
Lorraine earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from Beloit College, and holds a Master of Arts degree in Communications, specializing in Digital Media and Public Relations, from Johns Hopkins University.
Registering a domain name is one of the first steps to starting a new business. That’s because whatever name you choose will represent your business’s space on the internet – and, possibly, a customer’s first impression of your company.
But once you have that domain name, what do you do? Don’t stress over building your online space. You can start using your domain name right away. Here are three ways to do it.
If you send emails to your customers, it’s not only about what you say in your emails, but what your email address says about you. If you use a generic email like Gmail or Yahoo for your business, it might be time to consider something more professional and specific to your business. For example, what dental practice would you choose to contact, one that uses an email address like info@pearlybrightsmiles.com or toothymike88@gmail.com? It’s probably safe to assume you’d pick the first one. Yet, in 2015, almost half of U.S. small businesses still did not have a company-branded email.1
Here are a few myths about a customized email address that may be holding you back from growing your online brand:
2016 was a year characterized by historic elections, political initiatives, technological advancements and entertainment milestones. In the past, Verisign has identified how keyword trends from popular culture and newsworthy events are reflected in .com and .net domain registrations. 2016 was no exception.
Here is the list of the top 10 keywords in .com and .net domain name registrations for 2016.
The 2015 holiday shopping season was a good one for businesses online. Thanks to strong sales from Black Friday and Cyber Monday, online retailers reported an increase in sales of 15 percent from the previous year with Cyber Monday proving to be the largest online sales day ever, netting $3.07 billion.
However, only 51 percent of small businesses have websites, despite the fact that 97 percent of consumers search for products and services online, according to figures released earlier from The SCORE Association (SCORE).
The disconnect between small companies and the growing number of consumers who vet brick-and-mortar businesses based on their online presence could be keeping entrepreneurs from millions of customers – and dollars. SCORE Vice President of Marketing Bridget Weston Pollack said, “If a company or a small business doesn’t have an online presence, they are missing a huge percentage of the population that could be shopping at their store.”