During the televised U.S. vice-presidential debate, Vice President Dick Cheney directed viewers to a Web site where they could get the facts about the the vice-president’s role in the problems faced by Halliburton, the company where he was once CEO. The site he told viewers to visit: www.FactCheck.com Unfortunately, the site he meant was www.FactCheck.org, a non-partisan site run by the Annenberg Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

The .com site sells domain names; it’s housed offshore. When Cheney gave out the URL, traffic to the site skyrocketed. Desparate to reduce the volume of hits to their server, the site’s owners redirected traffic to an anti-Bush site. Visitors were greeted with the following missive: “President Bush is endangering our safety, hurting our vital interests and undermining American values.” Turns out the site is owned by George Soros, well-known billionaire and prominent Bush opponent. In his defense, Soros had no idea the offshore site was redirecting traffic to his own. But the message was certainly the opposite of what Cheney imagined.

The mistake is all too common. How many children doing research on government mistakenly visited www.WhiteHouse.com—a pornography site—instead of www.WhiteHouse.gov Cheney, though represents a generation that did not grow up with the Net. Hell, he barely grew up with color TV. In the minds of many in this generation—including organizational leaders—all Web sites are dot-coms, and they utter the words automatically. If your site is a .org, a .edu or a .gov, your leaders could easily send people to the wrong site. It’s hard to imagine equally disastrous results, but the outcome still could be less than great for your organization’s reputation.

Incidentally, according to CBS Marketwatch’s Frank Barnako (from whose e-mail newsletter I got this story), the Annenberg Center said its information mostly supports Democratic VP candidate John Edwards’ assertions, not the vindication Cheney said they would find at the site. Case studies always provide the best media relations object lessons.