You do your work with heart and soul, you work hard on every detail, your products are at the very top in terms of quality, and you don’t forget marketing either. You create specific websites for your marketing campaigns, invest serious resources and devote serious time to activities that bring people to that site. You don’t forget a single detail.
And then they write about you BBC, CNN, Guardian, New York Postdozens of media from Europe, through America and Australia, to of India and further. They praise you, your products, your activities? Well, not really. They write about one detail you are still forgot. About a detail that seriously compromised your credibility.
That’s what happened to Heinz
What would the Australian “TheStable” said “Heinz learns about domains the hard(core porn) way“. Untranslatable into Serbian, but the essence is that Heinz learned some things about Internet domains the (much) harder way. Namely, in 2012, Heinz organized a competition for its consumers to design their own bottle labels. The site was on the sagsmithheinz.de domain and was accessed via the QR code on the ketchup bottles. The competition ended in 2014 and Heinz did not renew the registration of that domain, because they no longer needed the domain. At least that’s what they thought.
From ketchup to scandal
As it already happens with well-visited domains that reach the market, the domain was registered by a porn company and put their site on it. In mid-June 2015, those bottles with the QR code were still in use and Damien Korell, a ketchup lover from Germany, decided to try his luck with label design. He scanned the QR code from the bottle he had and to his huge (and unpleasant) surprise, he ended up on a porn site. “Your ketchup is really not for minors,” he commented on Facebook, adding “It’s incomprehensible that you haven’t registered the domain for another year or two.” Unfathomable, really.
Heinz then offered Korel a free bottle of ketchup with a label of his own design as an apology. He tried to repair the damage as best he could, but… the story had already spread on the Internet.
The situation was also used by the porn company Fundorado, whose porn site was mentioned, and offered Korel a free one-year subscription. The new situation worked very well for them, but not for Heinz. Nobody wants to see their company’s name in the context that Heinz was in that June 2015. And all because of the simple fact that someone who made a decision about the domain he didn’t know how the internet worked.
The Internet remembers
Someone would say “Well, that was more than 10 years ago, it’s not current“. How to take it. There is no recent news about Heinz and porn sites, because Heinz never repeated anything like that. He learned his lesson. The hard way. But someone else would also say “That was more than 10 years ago, and it still shows up in searches!?“. Yes, you can see it. And it will be seen, because it is the Internet. What happens on the Internet, stays on the Internet. Forever.
That’s why prevention is always better than cure. If the shelf life of the ketchup bottle could not be matched with the “shelf life” of the internet domain (that is, the marketing campaign), the domain registration should have been renewed for a few more years and adequate information posted on the site. Ketchup users who, after the end of the campaign, would scan the QR code and go to the site, would find information that the campaign had ended, and over time traffic to that domain became so low so that it would not be interesting to “domain hunters” who are usually the owners of porn sites. The invested funds in the marketing budgets would be at the level of statistical error, and the protection of the company’s credibility would be at the appropriate level.
5 good reasons to renew domains
When the registration of your domain expires, and that domain is registered by someone else, various undesirable contents can be found on it – from untrue, to falsified, to pornographic. If search engines and Internet users still see that domain name as yours, especially if the domain contains the name of your company (as in the case of Heinz – sagsmithheinz.de), this can have a negative impact on your business.
If the new domain owner creates a site on purpose similar to yours posing as your companycan endanger you in several ways:
- Threat to credibility
On such a site, he can post content that is contrary to values your company or market misinformation that visitors may think were published by you.
- Endangering business
It can sell products on it very similar to yours, which are forgedand therefore offer them by at much lower prices.
- Data compromise
If it is organized on such a site appearance of shopping and accepting cards, your users’ data may be stolen. Believing they are still on your site, they may give the new owner their personal or financial information, which can have serious consequences for them and threaten your company’s reputation.
- Reputation problem
Your reputation can be threatened even without a direct attack from the side. Namely, if you still have it from your other sites links to that siteand it now contains pirated content, illegal products, pornographic material or other inappropriate content, it can seriously damage your company’s reputation and cause negative reactions from the public.
- Onslaught of competition
By promoting the site during the campaign, you probably provided the domain with a certain authority and ranking on the search engines. The new owner of the domain can use all that traffic for his own purposes, placing his site on the domain with its offering of competing products or servicesand in this way, through the search engine, attract your potential customers to your site. Everything is legal here – you yourself have “opened the door” to the competition.
Conclusion
Renewal of Internet domain registration after the end of the marketing campaign is an important step that companies often forget. This process is simple and requires minimal resources, and can prevent many serious problems.
In a world where digital identities are increasingly important, neglecting this aspect can have far-reaching negative consequences. On the other hand, nurturing digital assets shows strategic maturity and responsibility towards users and one’s own company. You should respect the Internet rules and do business in accordance with them.
Photo by Jireh Gibson, Pixabay
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