Sean Miller wrote a great article on TheHill.com. It re-iterates how important it is for politicians to take their online intellectual property seriously:

“You’ve got to get your domain name registered early, long before
you consider running for office”
--  Democratic Web strategist based in Oregon.

At Avantla, we provide tools to help local, state, and national parties track and monitor domains, social media and other online trademarks for all their candidates. We help make sure nothing falls through the cracks.

Read the full article here.

By now you've heard of the new "Tea Party". This is probably in spite of the terrible job they're doing on social media. Ron Callari at InvestorSpot.com wrote an incredible blog entry on the Tea Party -- he really digs into the details of the Twitter, Facebook, domain presence, etc. To sum up the big tea party convention:

"For such a large event that draws on people who like to hear the sound of their own voice, one would think they would have a significant presence on Twitter and Facebook."

At Avantla, we've seen the same thing with the major political parties. We did an analysis of all recent California candidates for local offices for both major parties. The result? Over 100 did not own the domain name for the politician: "FirstLast.com". And we found quite a few "Last.com" type domains available.

What does this ...

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I just read an interesting article about a cyber-squatter who goes after the domain names of up-and-coming politicians.

Seems no one is immune, but nowadays politicians need to be much more savvy. For a politician, it's especially bad because political opponents are sometimes the ones doing the squatting.

According to another article, the body that governs protection of domains names, WIPO, may not allow using UDRP to recover a politicians domain name. To quote from the article:

"The protection of an individual politician's name, no matter how famous, is outside the scope of the policy since it is not connected with commercial exploitation"

If you're thinking of running for office: After you get the best possible domain, be sure you've acquired all the social networking accounts for your name.

Voters will be looking for you online to learn more about your positions. And your opponents will ...

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