A new energy marketing campaign offers a reminder why domain registration best practices is so important.
The recent launch of the nationwide “Vote 4 Energy” ad campaign on print, radio and television media provides much for energy marketers to admire. While the campaign does many things right from a marketing perspective, a parody of its video already exists on a nearly identical website, something the American Petroleum most likely could have avoided by remembering one simple rule in advance:
If you don’t lock up any domain in advance that remotely resembles yours, you run the risk of your enemies moving in to lead your readers astray. That’s exactly what happened here, because API failed to protect its Internet turf.
Kicking off this week after the Iowa Caucuses, Vote4Energy.org aims to educate voters about the energy issues at stake this year. For more background information on the campaign, go here.
As expected, Greenpeace representatives have voiced heavy opposition to the campaign, through blogs and media interviews. API can’t do much about those. But it could have done something about the fake Vote for Energy website from Greenpeace, complete with the same fonts and color scheme. It’s so good that a friend of mine thought both websites were produced by API.
The legitimate Vote4Energy video intersperses “real people” in true Choddy style, each one saying they vote for jobs, more domestic energy from existing oil and natural gas sources. Despite claims from the opposition that producers manipulated the production and misled people, the video appears to be simple and effective.
In the spoof video, models portraying oil executives state comments such as “I vote for oil, because it’s real, not like wind.” in a nearly identical look of the original. Along with different logos from oil companies, other statements include “I vote for higher gas prices” and “I want to drill everywhere.”
A screenshot from the real video
Screenshot from fake video
Energy marketers can’t control the level of opposition to their message. But in this case, it was too easy for Greenpeace. Why take a chance to allow your audience to mistakenly go to another site, tarnishing your reputation in the process?
In his post on domain best practices, Internet marketing expert Todd Mintz says “also, strongly consider purchasing the .net, .org & any relevant country-specific domain names as well.”
In addition to his “Buy first, publicize later” advice, Mintz lists three other best practices.
1. Register misspelled variants: Once you have your relevant domain names, determine the common misspellings and purchase the .com names for each. Then have each of them redirect to your site.
2. Register generic variants: Have a team of people determine what generic terms they would search for to arrive at your site and purchase those generic versions as well.
3. Protect your domains: He says to make sure your domain registrar login information is protected, your domains are set to auto-renew and your WHOIS information is current.