I am spending some time away with family, and it always seems that when a piece of domain name news makes it to mainstream media outlets, I am always asked, “did you hear about…”
This morning at breakfast was no different. I was asked if I heard about Bank of America defensively registering domain names with the CEO’s name. For instance, BOA registered BrianMoynihanSucks.com, BrianMoynihanBlows.com and many others. Of course the humor is that my friend Andrew’s article on Domain Name Wire was the impetus for the mainstream news, and it was funny to hear the store referenced by non-industry people.
It reminded me of the time one of my best friends emailed me an article written on CNET about the Sex.com foreclosure auction. Ironically and unbeknownst to him when he forward it to me, the article’s source was an article I wrote!
Merry Christmas & Happy New Year
Interesting proactive approach by BOA on reputation management for his name. Good stuff, maybe WikiLeaks will take it easy on him, http://www.switched.com/2010/12/24/bank-of-america-brianmoynihansucks-com-wikileaks/
This could actually work against BofA (negative publicity) even before the WikiLeaks story comes out. Evidently BofA thought it was worth the risk – this story once again proves the effectiveness and importance of keyword specific domain names!
Aside from “Sucks” and a *maybe* a couple others, it’s impossible to make defensive registrations like this and have them actually put a stop to muh. If not BrianMoynihanSucks.com, then MoynihanSucksBad.com, or BrianMoynihanIsADouche.com… and if not .com, then .org…. These types of registrations are trying to hold back the ocean with a bucket. This isn’t a corporation showing sophistication about domains; it’s a corporation showing severe cluelessness.
To wit: CluelessBrianMoynihan.com is available to reg. For those of you on the cutting edge of “new domaining”, 3dBrianMoynihan.com and BrianMoynihan.co are both available too.
Its surprising that any of these are still available. I figure domainers would normally have speculated / picked up all the leftovers by now hoping to sell them to bofa