The Marketing Plaza

Is Shakespeare finally obsolete?  Is it no longer true that a Rose by any other name would smell as sweet?

In marketing, names are the brand, and not naming a company or product correctly can make the road to success all that much harder to travel. Given enough time, money and talent any name can become a household brand, but not everyone has the deep pockets of Apple, Google, Cher or Madonna.

In today’s hyper-connected world, naming protocols are all that more complicated and need to take into account Internet compatibilities among other things.  A new company, for instance, needs to be registered with the correct state authority, but if the corresponding name is not available as a url, even the best name can prove troublesome with online brand congruity.

Initials, once popular in the Fortune 500 realm, from IBM to ATT&T, are difficult for smaller companies.  Initials tent to be hard to remember, don’t help in SEO searches, and feel cold in the ever-funky social media world.  In the digital-sphere, better to have a name that means nothing such as Starbucks for coffee rather than initials that reek of corporate culture.

Unfortunately, small businesses, in particular, sometimes have to just get started with a less than perfect name and deal with the consequences later. But without the deep pockets of larger corporations, rebranding at a later date is not always an option.

The answer?  When starting up – get as  close to the perfect name as soon as possible, but don’t invest too much in it until you’ve completed your due diligence, which includes:

1. A check of state records in any state in which you think you’ll do business.
2. A check of available urls  in the .com arena.
3. A check of alternative url choices in the .com arena.
4. A review of similar names with minor misspellings.
5. A gut check on the look and feel of the name with not only company principals and close loved ones, but a decent designer.

It takes most people nine months, the full gestation period, to choose a name for a new baby.  Businesses frequently  launch in far less time, which can result in some odd or oddly uncreative names, frequently named after the business owner.  If you just want to send out an invoice, any name will do, but if you want to build a brand, get a marketing person on your team to give you a broader view of options.

It’s well known the average CMO, meaning Chief Marketing Officer, doesn’t last even two years. No wonder. Despite all the other challenges facing a top marketing person, here’s one more: the job doesn’t exist in the new social media world!  It’s hard to hold on to a phantom job in an ever-disappearing traditional field.

The new CMO, according to social media modernist Brian Solis is a Community Management Officer.  Not responsible for getting messages out, this new position is one of engagement and relationship-building.   As Solis states in his new e-book The Art and Science of Blogger Relations: “they are on the front lines of listening and engaging in conversations across the web.”  If you don’t have a Kindle, you may not be able to read it. Solis is totally dedicated to engaging via new media replete with typos throughout the copy and all.

Unlike ivory tower Chief Marketing Officers with big corner offices in corporate complexes, the Community Management Officer is down in the trenches, trolling the web and providing valuable content in key areas.  It’s a person who tends to be ahead of the times, much like Solis who blog published his Social Media Manifesto in June 2007!

Warning: It’s not a short read — at least 11 pdf pages, in direct contrast to the average blog post.

Recommendation: Read it. It foretells the future of communication.

Since the social media world is all about making the world smaller, I was not surprised to see that Solis had co-authored a book on PR with Deidre Breckenridge, a Jersey girl who heads the PR for PFS Marketwyse, an ad agency that pitched me at the newspaper almost a decade ago.  We didn’t hire them, but they had amazing work.  They showed us an ad campaign for positioning the newspaper that I remember to this day.  We didn’t buy it , but  it was a campaign the newspaper industry as a whole through the NAA (Newspaper Association of America) should have adopted. Perhaps if they had, they’d be in better shape today.