Recently Donald Trump’s campaign acquired the domain for jebbush.com* and directed it to donaldjtrump.com.
This raises the question, what sort of campaign is Jeb! running when his staff hasn’t even registered his own name?
Classic domain warfare dictates scooping up all likely (as well as expected negative) URLs so you can control the message.
As it turns out, Jeb! is not the only one who has missed this rather basic tactic. (the screen shots below can be clicked through to the actual sites). In fact, depending on whether the middle initial ‘J’ is involved, The Donald missed a few himself.
—> http://www.tedcruz.com was taken over by a group promoting immigration reform, forcing Ted’s people to base operations on tedcruz.org (wouldn’t have been his first choice).
—> http://www.carlyfiorina.org was hijacked by someone with an axe to grind. (spoiler alert: the last screen tells us it was 30,000 people – – all of whom had families)
…and Donald himself was caught flat-footed when he allowed http://www.trumpsucks.com to be directed to none other than Fox News’s Megyn Kelly! Megyn punks Donald!
By the measure of controlling the URL landscape, overall, aside from the Megyn Kelly thing, Trump does pretty well. He grabbed Jeb’s site (probably paid a squatter for it), and got ahead of a few ‘Ihate***.com’ sites, including some of his competitors. (see chart below)
Ted Cruz and Jeb! fare worst. They don’t have their name.com URL and both need a less obvious URL for their base of operations. Jeb particularly has been rumored as a presidential candidate for at least 30 years. You would think he would have been savvy enough to get ahead of the game and grab his own name domain.
John Kasich, Bernie Sanders, Ben Carson, and Hillary Clinton have decided to invest in only one URL. The others are somewhere in between.
Is URL control a huge deal? Probably not – – someone who gets redirected is likely not going to be automatically swayed just by landing on an unexpected site.
But still, there’s something to be said for controlling access to your message. Maybe it’s time for each of us to look at www.(your name)sucks.com and see what comes up!
*in WordPress, jebbush auto-corrects to nebbish. hmmm.
The Armchair MBA 