How to generate bad publicity for your firm

Corporate attorneys aren’t always the best PR people. Take the folks at telecom provider BT Ireland.

BT Ireland found out regarding the web site BTIrelandSucks.com. Clearly the domain was set up as a gripe site. Very few people visited the site. But then BT Ireland sent a cease & desist letter to the owner. The owner laughed it off and the press picked up the story. Now thousands of people are hitting the BTIrelandSucks.com site and reading the owner’s gripes regarding the firm. Whoops.

Of course, BT Ireland will lose its UDRP dispute. “Sucks” added to a domain usually results in a victory by the original owner, unless they clearly bought the domain to extort money or profited from the domain. Only a few rogue arbitrators have sided with big firms in these cases. And Adam Beecher, who owns BTIrelandSucks.com, made this clear to BT Ireland in a letter:

Dear Rosannagh,

I acknowledge receipt of your letter, posted below. Good luck with that. Perhaps if your firm had tried to engage me as a client rather than try to threaten me, this site wouldn’t exist. Now it’s just going to grow.

If you have any spare time between threatening people, you might want to do a little research into UDRP stats, in particular decisions applied to -sucks domain names. They traditionally go to to the respondent.