Johnson & Johnson's Domain Name Strategies

If you're a big company concerned about product liability, the wilds of the Internet are a frightening place. Rumors get started and spread around, and before you know it you have a public relations problem. People Google your company name and they get some horror story as the first hit.

Perhaps that's why Johnson & Johnson has bought up hundreds of negative domain names related to the sweetener Splenda:  it's an effort to discourage any online trash-talking.

The Sustainable is Good blog, which posted this story, lists the domains that they say Johnson & Johnson owns:

splendasucks.net, .org, .biz, .info
splendakills.net, .org, biz .info
splendatruth.com , .net, .org, .biz, .info
splendapoison.com, .net, .org, .biz, .info
thedangersofsplenda.com, .net, .org, .biz, .info
thefactsaboutsplenda.com, .net, .org, .biz, .info
thesplendadangers.com, .net, .org, .biz, .info
thesplendafacts.com, .net, .org, .biz, .info
victimsofsplenda.com, .net, .org, .biz, .info

any many, many more.

This sounds like something out of Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom's book The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations. And Brafman and Beckstrom note that if you try to chop up decentralized "starfish"-type organizations, you just get more organizations, not fewer. You can't kill a decentralized information system by trying to take away the fora for discussion. It's decentralized. That's the whole point.

As Seth Godin puts it: "Is there enough money in the world to buy enough domain names to keep a determined person from saying something nasty about Splenda?" No, there isn't. There is only so much control that can be exerted, even if resources were infinite, which they aren't.

On the other hand, Johnson & Johnson's concerns are not trivial. There are already websites out there like  orthoevrapatchlawsuit.com, orthoevrainjury.net and orthoevrasideeffectslawsuit.com. You'll find all of them on the first page if you Google for information about J&J's Ortho Evra contraceptive patch, and they tend suggest that Ortho Evra is risky even though many widely available drugs should be of far more concern to consumers.

Buying up domain names and putting content at those domains -- as Johnson & Johnson has done at splendatruth.com, for example -- might also be a decent, low-cost way of developing Google hits that push down obscure websites in the rankings. I've written before about how I get search hits related to the drug suboxone even though I have barely any substantive content on this blog about suboxone. I get the hits just because the other content that's out there on the web is also quite minimal, so I seem comparatively authoritative to Google when it comes to suboxone. That's less likely to happen with Splenda because Johnson & Johnson has taken the affirmative step of disseminating positive, substantive content online about Splenda.

The bottom line, though, is the point that Brafman and Beckstrom (along with people like Seth Godin) make. The Internet changes the rules of publicity, making it much more difficult to control. The focus for smart companies therefore has to change somewhat. It can't just be about saying that a given product is safe and effective. The product in fact needs to be safe and effective, and it should preferably be so safe and so effective that sheer greatness of the product becomes a story that people want to tell.      

Comments

[Tricia]

Wondering if anyone has a sick child linked to the J&J product agent cool blue. I do!! Went for blood tests today. Contaminated with microorganisms, whats with that??? Scarey stuff based on J&J's history

[Gibran]

I had heard about J&J buying domain names in an effort to prevent negative publicity about their products, but will that really keep information from being posted on the Internet? I doubt it. There's already plenty of information on Splenda and Ortho Evra on the internet. I would like to contribute to your post by providing some information on ortho evra, which can be found at http://www.onlinelawyersource.com/birth-control-patch/index.html