Bad News For Anyone Who Wants To Tell The Internet Every Exec At Bank Of America Sucks

BAC's already beat ya to it.

>In recent days, at least 439 Internet domain names that are critical of the bank’s top officials were taken off the market. The registrations of the domain names, which include imaginative swipes at the bank’s CEO, such as BrianMoynihanBlows.com and BrianTMoynihanSucks.net, effectively stop BofA-haters from slamming the bank’s top executives and directors –- or at least blocks any slams using a couple of very specific pejoratives. Companies have made it a practice to scoop up negative Web addresses that might be used by disgruntled customers, as The Wall Street Journal has reported. Such defensive Web strategies are particularly important at a time when a corporate reputation can be sullied by a few clicks of the mouse. For example, a satiric Twitter account set up after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill became a hub for criticism about BP.

But the buying of BofA names is a different approach. Where most efforts have been focused on the corporate brands, the focus here is BofA’s directors and corporate officers. The BofA registrations followed this formula: Pull up the public roster of the bank’s senior officers and directors, and buy up web addresses with the officials’ names followed by the words “blows” or “sucks,” according to the list of the recently registered BofA Web addresses collected by research service Domain Tools. For example, among the domain names bought in recent days are at least 12 variations on Bank of America Chairman Charles O. Holliday Jr.