Back in 2013, I offered An illustration why you should gain control over your name on the ‘net, both through buying domain names and reserving your name at social media sights (oops, meant to say sites!).
To illustrate the concept that you should grab control over your name on the ’net, I pointed out a pro-Second Amendment activist who bought a domain and turned it into a pro-gun website to poke fun at an anti-gun politician.
The domain?
- www.senatorfeinstein.com
I just checked that address and found out it is a dead link. It used to be an advocacy site. However, the joke (if you are into such things) and the point (which is the reason for this post) stand.
In recent weeks, a politician from the opposite side of the aisle got zinged. She is former head of a large technology company. Someone grabbed a domain including her name and put up a one-page site criticizing how many people were laid off during her tenure.
The domain?
The politician had an interview scheduled and knew she would take some kidding.
She was ready. See Carly Fiorina trolls Seth Meyers over domain names. at The Washington Examiner.
When kidded about losing control of one specific domain, she asked who owned the host’s domain name? He didn’t know. She said she did. She bought it while in the green room.
Check out:
It points to her campaign site.
If it is a point of criticism that she is technologically sloppy because she missed that domain, then consider the criticism she has returned by buying the following site names:
All of them point to her campaign site.
Again, I’m not making any political points.
What I am saying is we should all learn from this. If you are a high-profile person or ministry or business, you should grab control of every domain name, including all variations and misspellings.
And grab all extensions, .com .org .net .us .me .info .biz .club .ngo .ong and another half-dozen I forgot about.
At this point, I’m guessing some clever creative political hack somewhere is buying up a ton of domain names.
This is cross-posted from my other blog, Nonprofit Update.
A few thoughts for CPAs. You may not be visible enough to get this much attention. It might still be worthwhile to get the .com, .org, .net, .biz, and maybe .me and .us extension for your business domain. Extra domains are going to be around $12 or $20 each if you use one of the low-cost domain name registrars. That is a rather low-cost to guard your domain.