What happens when you, a PR firm with infinite resources, don’t creatively purchase all of your client’s brand’s domain names and all of its variants, misspellings, transposed letters, and TLDs? Well, you get ridiculed by someone who does and who hates you.
Let’s say you’re a big box retailer with infinite resources. Let’s say you hire the planet’s best PR firm and ask them to create a foundation for you, and let’s call that foundation Working Families for Wal-Mart.
With infinite resources, wouldn’t you make sure you CYA by buying up all the domain names possible, to control your client’s brand?
Well, no it doesn’t, because most companies — even smart companies like Edelman — don’t purchase all the domain name variants, such as full-text, www.workingfamiliesforwalmart.com instead of just www.forwalmart.com.
In this case, Edelman, Wal-Mart, and Working Families for Wal-Mart got P3WND by an acerbic “satire” site branded exactly like your site but owned, controlled, and counter-messaged by your arch-nemesis, Wal-Mart Watch!
I have not seen this covered. Seems to me like another pretty serious tactical decision. Domains cost about $9/year.
