He’s an Okay Guy in Real Life, So Why Does the Internet Say AndrewRicci.sucks? (A Word of Advice for PR Pros)
At his best, Andrew Ricci is a nice guy. Helpful. Funny. Some would even dare to say he’s charming.
At his worst, he’s “okay, I guess.” Mediocre, mostly. A self-aggrandizing narcissist. Grating, especially when he refers to himself in third person. According to the Internet, AndrewRicci.sucks.
Many of us in the PR industry deal with reputation management on a day-to-day basis, and there is no place where reputational threats pop up more frequently than online. We’ve seen activists harness the power of Facebook and Twitter to derail major corporate moves or force people from their jobs. We’ve seen blogs and websites antagonize companies and executives across the world. And as the Internet continues to develop, we have to stay ahead of these curves to provide the best possible service to our clients. One of these new frontiers is the rise of new Top-Level Domain Names, including so-called “expressive” domain names.
In the early days of the Internet’s architecture, top-level domain extensions were, for the most part, broadly generic, and there were a limited number to go around. You were either a dot-com, a dot-net, or a dot-org. A select few got to use the elite dot-gov, dot-int, dot-edu, or dot-mil, but that was it. No matter your webpage, you were stuck with something pretty basic (and boring!) that gave no information other than whether you were a nonprofit, government agency, distributed network of computers, school, or military branch — or just a bland old web site.
Today, though, there are more than 1,200 domain names, giving consumers more options for specificity than ever. If I opened up a pizzeria, I could set up AndrewRicci.pizza to let consumers know exactly what kind of business I was operating. If I qualified for Wimbledon, I could direct my hordes of fans to AndrewRicci.tennis. There are hundreds of these for seemingly every business and industry.
While many of the new domain names are utilitarian in their descriptiveness or specific to a certain company, others are considered “expressive” in that they push an opinion in the site address itself — these are the “dot-rocks” and “dot-sucks” types of domain names. That’s how I ended up creating AndrewRicci.sucks (to answer the obvious question: sure, I could have created and populated AndrewRicci.rocks using the same free service, but where’s the fun in that?)
The point I’d like to get to through this self-deprecating exercise is that as a public relations practitioner, I spend most of my days working to create, repair, or amplify the brands and reputations of my clients. And as a communications professional, having control of AndrewRicci.sucks is an asset in protecting my own personal brand. It is the first step in ensuring that I can combat negative attacks by promoting Andrew Ricci (the brand) in a way that works to my benefit — and helps to neutralize whatever enemies I might have out there.
As the Internet grows and “expressive” domain names continue to come online, we need to get in front of them wherever we can. That way Andrew Ricci won’t suck, even if the Internet tries to say so.
Andrew S. Ricci is a Vice-President at LEVICK, a strategic communications and public affairs firm based in Washington, DC.
