Gripe sites can come in all forms, but sometimes people take it a little too far. In case you don't know what a gripe site is, it's a website used by people to voice their grievances against a company. Some of the most famous gripe sites include Mitsubishisucks, starbucked, and boycottwalmart.
While gripe sites aren't nearly as popular as they were a few years ago, companies have started to become smarter when it comes to preventing these types of things. Protesting the name of their company is important. Several companies including Xerox, as mentioned in the text, identifies how they prevent from gripe sites.
One important thing that a large company should do is to buy any domains that could be a gripe site. For example if Apple was looking in to buying some possible gripe sites, they would probably look into iphonessuck, applesucks, appleisawful, and more. They would want to make it difficult for anyone to create a gripe site in the first place. A dun fact is that almost 1/3 of sites that end in the word "sucks" are gripe sites.
It is recommended that once the company buys these sites that they shouldn't just leave the site empty. If a visitor goes looking for a gripe site, and find some that are blank, that may make them more inclined to make an actual gripe site. To avoid this, it's recommended that the companies use it as a platform to answer people's questions or respond to their grievances on their own terms. I feel like most companies would not go this route because it would be a lot to maintain on top of their already existing customer service sector, but I can see where it would be valuable.
Overall, gripe sites can be very annoying to companies. Some companies have even gone to court over gripe sites. Companies should be aware of gripe sites and how to prevent them.
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