United Airlines pilots attack United CEO Glenn Tilton with his own domain name!

The Air Line Pilots Association just launched a website attacking United Airlines' CEO, Glenn Tilton using his own domain name at GlennTilton.com. Air service workers unions and airline management have been at odds for years and the sordid state of the economics of the airline industry is going to increase these sorts of online public relations conflicts.

When last year I first started writing case studies about the use of the web in advocacy and public relations, I focused on the Writers Union making a parody site of their strike opponent, the Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). The comedy writers at the heart of the parody site managed to rent a similar domain name to their target, www.amptp.com.  The Association was livid, and announced their site had been hijacked which drove even more traffic to it.  They finally (and correctly) began to ignore the whole thing and the writers moved on to other projects.

The Airline Pilots Association attack site isn't a parody at all, but it's a great online pr technique. A parody of Glenn Tilton's private blog would be pretty funny for about a week.  Their choice to pursue a transparent online advocacy website is smart, and it has the potential to be a powerful platform for the Pilots campaign against management's moves to furlough pilots.

If I were talking to United's public relations staff (or Glenn Tilton himself), or if you were to find yourself in this situation, I'd offer the following advice:

1. You do not talk about GlennTilton.com
2. You DO NOT talk about GlennTilton.com.  (If this isn't obvious, go read the Wikipedia entry for Zack Exley's GWBush.com website.)
   
3. Don't bother starting dispute resolution proceedings for the domain name GlennTilton.com.  Filing dispute resolution proceedings would merely raise its profile and you wouldn't win anyway.
   
4. Have Glenn Tilton trademark his name and start an independent consulting company to establish use of the trademark in commerce.  Celebrities like Morgan Freeman have shown that a trademark is the best weapon to get the domain name back through the domain name dispute resolution process.
5. The day after the airline and the pilot's union settle a big agreement and everybody is pretending to play nice for a while, Glenn Tilton should file a motion with the Uniform Dispute Resolution process to get the domain name back.  It could take as little as 60 days.
   
6. Don't let it get under your skin.  There's little you can do about it at this stage.  You're going to have to fight an opponent who has a clever domain name for a year or so.
7. Start a program to find embarrassing facts about the management of the Air Line Pilots Association.  This sort of information is often effective at undermining their leadership.  You can't release it under your own name, but you can certainly find a way to get it out there through many of the anti-union groups online. 
   

If I were talking to the Pilots Association about maximizing this opportunity, I'd recommend the following:

1. Start a campaign to get others to link to you as quickly as possible.  You currently are #4 on Google for searches of "Glenn Tilton" and you want to preserve it.  More importantly, you don't even show up in the top 40 for "United Airlines".
2. Get funny fast or you'll burn out your readers.  Balancing the seriousness with a little humor will make your website a must-read.  You'll probably get more reporters to read your materials if they know you can make them laugh occasionally.  After all, isn't getting reporters to read your work one of the first goals of all public relations people?
   
3. Get a mailing list.  You can get one that automatically sends your blog postings out for free from Feedburner.
4. Commit to a writing schedule: Writing frequently (bi-daily or thrice-weekly) about the company is the only way to raise your Google rank and your online profile.  United's public relations operation puts out something every few days, and each of those should be fodder for you to reinforce your campaign.  If you stop writing, you'll waste the best opportunity you have.
5. Recognize that others have tread this ground before.  For examples of how to criticize a company's leadership with a combination of personal failures and professional ones, check out Valleywag.com's campaign against Sheryl Sandberg tenure as Facebook's COO.

Both parties should be allocating in the mid-five figures for the next 8-10 months for content for these sites.