Article was written by Pierre Zarokian of Reputation Stars.

At present, companies need to manage public relations as part of their marketing efforts. It’s quite different from how marketing was in the past. Customer feedback had been measured primarily through product evaluation and market testing. Today, customer complaints occur on Facebook, on blogs or in the short messages on Twitter. This is fairly harmless in many cases, but .sucks domain names endanger reputation management, SEO and public relations for any business regardless of size.

Reputation Threats

At the moment, the favored sites customers utilize to release their frustrations include Yelp, PissedConsumer, ScamBook, Complaints.com and ComplaintsBoard. These sites are prominent simply because people can post content anonymously. This creates an opening for individuals to defame whatever brand name for their own gain. These websites usually position highly in Google and other search engines, which means that the issue does not simply vanish by itself.

With .sucks websites, businesses might want to consider whether it is worthwhile to own that Web property or take the chance that their brand name will survive whatever possible disputes may come. There is a short time period approaching where ICANN will let larger companies and superstars invest in their .sucks URL, and accessibility will be available to everyone after that. Still, these organizations have bigger wallets and additional data on managing these types of concerns.

This is quite comparable to the danger that the “.porn” website URL disaster began. Harvard, Microsoft and other significant businesses and professionals instantly registered for their .porn domain because of the possible hazard that leaving the url unclaimed could cause.

Don’t risk your reputation on hope. The suffix “.sucks” is coming, are you going to be proactive about managing your reputation before that happens?

This article was written by Pierre Zarokian of Reputation Stars. Check out their website to learn about reputation management services and to read some great articles.