The Name of the Game

Pretend it's your baby.

Building your brand starts the moment you start building your company. The decisions you make as you plan, create and launch a new business will inevitably have long-lasting impact on your long-term success.

And perhaps the most consequential of those decisions is a deceptively simple one: just what are you going to call this new company?

Resist the urge to rush that decision. And resist the urge for self-indulgence. Naming the company after yourself, or your kids, or some meaningless word that sounds nice to your ears — there have been plenty of entrepreneurs who’ve managed to make this work. But there have been plenty more who’ve tried it and failed.

Your first consideration in naming your company is the one that should inform all your decision making: what does this mean for my customers? To answer that, you must know your customers, or at least know the type of customer you’ll be targeting. If you sell to a staid, conservative crowd, then one of those edgy, modern monikers — think Tumblr, Skype and Etsy — probably won’t win them over.

Speaking of pronunciation, how does it sound spoken aloud? How does it look on a letterhead? Will lazy tongues or unfamiliar typefaces change its meaning? There’s an unfortunately high possibility of brand damage here. You must anticipate and mitigate it.

Finally, can you trademark your name and buy a suitable Web domain? You might eventually retain a trademark attorney, but why not just start with a Google search? See what companies are out there with similar names, and try to anticipate consumer confusion that might result. And do a search for available domain names, but be warned: there are “domain squatters” out there who specialize in buying up dot-com names based on others’ searches, only to sell them back later at exorbitant costs.

Try to settle on a name that makes sense to your customers, that tells them in an instant who you are, what you offer and why you’re the best at it. Choose a name upon which you can hang the entirety of your marketing program — because that’s exactly what you’re about to do.

The C4:

1. Choosing a company name is the entrepreneur’s single most important marketing decision. Success depends upon treating that decision with that level of seriousness.
2. Don’t rush it and don’t take it as an opportunity to pat yourself on the back. Do look for names that speak directly to the kind of customer you want to attract.
3. Anticipate trademark and Web domain issues, as well as every nuance in how the name will sound aloud and appear on the page and screen.
4. Create a marketing program that starts with that carefully considered, ultimately perfect name…then build your dream from there.

The Wild Wild Net

Will SOPA circle the drain as privacy succumbs to piracy?

You’d expect a little less anarchy from something originally funded by the government and built by the military.

But anarchic is exactly what the Internet has become. It’s been that way for a long time, in fact; ever since it metaphorically broke free from the government lab and spread across the world.

Not that there haven’t been efforts to rein it back in. The most recent attempts to tame the wild, wild net were SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act — the House of Representatives’ proposed legislation to fight Web-based copyright infringement) and PIPA (Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act, or PROTECT IP Act — the Senate’s version of the same bill).

You probably remember the howls of dismay that reverberated across the digital landscape after these bills were introduced late last year. Protests culminated with the January 18 blackout of Wikipedia, Reddit and an estimated 7,000 other websites.

Critics argue that the bills’ definitions of “piracy” are so broad they would effectively spell an end to news aggregation sites and just about all user-content hosting services (which means no more YouTube and a serious hobbling of Facebook).

The backlash forced SOPA and PIPA to be tabled in committee — not abandoned, exactly, but at least set aside, probably until after the election.

All of which leaves mixed emotions. On one hand, the wild and woolly nature of the World Wide Web has been an awesome adventure in unfettered free enterprise.

On the other hand, online criminality is rampant. Intellectual property is filched like dime store candy. Predators are everywhere. Naive and vulnerable netizens, the very young and very old, get victimized in unspeakable ways.

If SOPA and PIPA aren’t the answer, then what is? Are we addicted to anarchy, or do we grow weary of the lawlessness? 

One thing’s sure: our virtual world is built solely of electrons and consensus. How it’s governed, if it’s governed — that’ll be by consensus, too.

The C4:

1. SOPA and PIPA are controversial for their broad definitions of copyright infringement. These bills are currently dormant, but are by no means dead.
2. The Web we have today came about by what we — all its users — opted to create. We’ve collectively built history’s most powerful tool for communication and commerce.
3. We’ve also built a criminal’s paradise. Some of its victims are our most vulnerable citizens.
4. What’s to be done about that? It’s up to all of us to decide.