Morris Iemma needs Online Reputation Management.
The merits of each of the New South Wales candidates for this year’s State election are questionable at best… but I’ll leave that for others to comment on! What I would like to comment on though is the terrible job that the Morris Iemma marketing people have done with his online brand management.
A few weeks ago I thought that I would have a quick scan over the search results of each of the top two candidates, Morris Iemma (Labour) and Peter Debnam (Liberal). I couldn’t believe it when I clicked on one of the top 10 results www.morrisiemma.com , only to find that it was owned by the Liberal party with a flash video telling everybody not to vote for Labour.
After a good hearty chuckle to myself I decided to head over to our domain registration tool to see what other versions of his name had been registered. At that point of time the only names that have been registered were morrisiemma.com.au & morrisiemma.com, however when heading back now I see that morrisiemma.net and morrisiemma.info have also been registered.
When visiting both of these domains we find what is basically an opportunistic domainer asking:
This Website is for sale. If your name is Morris Iemma, or you (or your party) have some interest in aquiring this domain for your promotional purposes,
please email: buynow@morrisiemma.info and make a serious offer!
I’m not sure what price this enterprising chap would be willing to part with these names for, but I am sure that it would be a hell of a lot more than the $20 they would have cost Morris if he had grabbed them at a few months ago (or realistically and a few years ago).
A large part of Online reputation management is being proactive in protecting valued assets such as your company name, name of your products and the name of your key personnel. Politics is all about reputation and the fact that Morris Iemma didn’t have people around that were switched on enough to secure all domain name variations of his name is a disgrace.
