Today’s FT.com article, Blackstone turns hostile on website names, is a pretty good short course on how to approach domain name strategy from a reputational point of view. (It’s more tactical than strategy, but let’s not sweat the terms.)
Blackstone, a private equity group that’s been in the news recently (see, e.g., Telegraph article, 030611), is now defending itself against detractors by registering the whole host of domain names that it doesn’t want to be known by:
“According to domain-registry records, MarkMonitor, a brand protection firm, has registered sites including blackstonesucks.com and schwarzmansucks.com, for the group’s chief executive, Stephen Schwarzman.” FT.com
That they’re doing this now is telling. But why didn’t they register these domain names before? It’s standard practice in many big brands to have a URL or domain name strategy. Large companies register hundreds of URLs and social media labels (not to mention using metadata similarly for search etc) that cover everything from legitimate names through misspellings to hostile possibilities. And international brands need to do so in each country/language they operate in.
There are three main reasons for doing it:
- 1. Customer protection
- 2. Trademark and product protection
- 3. Reputation
How is it done? Get an agency to do it. Your average marketing or digital manager can’t just come up with a list of possibilities in English and other languages. It’s a specialised task. (I’ve known organisations where URL strategy has been left to the IT department to take care of, but that’s not ideal because it’s not a technology issue.)
The main things you want the specialist to cover are: misspellings of brand or company names; hostile naming conventions; anything that implies sales and thus fraud or associated infringements.
How far should you go? When is such a list of URLs complete? Is becoming involved in social media really necessary (e.g. registering and claiming accounts and names on Twitter, Facebook etc)?
How long is a piece of string? How big is your budget? What are the risks? It really depends on your brand strategy, product and reputational risk assessments and marketing/branding resources.
Blackstone’s activity and Rupert Murdoch and his wife starting Twitter accounts to counter the fakers are two examples of crisis reaction. The companies almost certainly had some level of URL brand protection before their respective crises, even if their officers or associates didn’t. But the heat’s been turned up and they’re reacting. Whether they should or not is another question.
