Naming your business can be challenging. Do you use your name? Do you include explicitly the kind of business it is? Is it more abstract and evocative?
For your next cemetery, golf course, apartment complex, condo development, housing subdivision, retirement home (err … senior living center) or any of a handful of other business ventures, just mix and match the words below into pairs.
Obviously, I’m devoting insufficient time to this blog. Not only should there be more posts more often, this list should have been produced as an infographic or – better yet – a little interactive program. Regardless, your generic name awaits!
Your generic business name does not belong in such a beautiful place.
ALL-PURPOSE (can be used as first or second word in your name)
Hill(s)
Meadow(s)
Willow(s)
Pine(s)
Forest
Park
Glen
Aspen
Grove
Hollow
Valley
Wood(s)
Pebble
Boulder
Canyon
Farm(s)
Gable(s)
Garden(s)
Cove
Creek
Stream
Lake(s)
Spring(s)
Spring (season)
Winter
ONLY TO START (can only be used as first word your name)
Whispering
Rolling
Running
Flying
Thundering (use with caution)
Bear, Fox, Deer or other animal (bonus: need not be regionally appropriate!)
ONLY TO END (should only be used as the second of the two words in your name)
Crossing(s)
Run
Manor
Estate(s)
Terrace
Plural of any of the all-purpose words
Have you been to that new golf course Boulder Terrace!? Have you visited my new apartment at Whispering Pines!? Did she just buy the last home in Fox Valley!? Is your grandfather buried at Forest Glen!?
Again, you’re welcome.
I have certainly missed some of the wonderfully generic words available. Please use the comment section to:
a) add more words (and qualify them if necessary) and/or
b) add more business ventures for which this mix+match is appropriate
As always, thanks for visiting and for reading. Disclaimer: I do not advocate for generic naming of businesses.
We’ve got “do-not-call” registries. We’ve got CAN-SPAM. And we’ve still got tons (hundreds of thousands of tons) of phone books being dumped upon us. I don’t propose that it be illegal, but I am frustrated by the incredible waste of resources it represents.
Here’s the latest in legal spam; it greeted me upon my return home from work tonight.
Thanks for the spam, Verizon.
It’s not quite irony, but there’s something funny about their QR Code pitch to download their app. Really? You had to print, bag and deliver door-to-door an unsolicited pitch to download your app? No better way to reach me with that message!?
To those of you hoping to eliminate unsolicited messages of all kinds, here is a wonderful resource from ecocycle.org (based in Longmont, Colorado). It’s a collection of links to online forms to remove yourself from lists.
And to those businesses still paying tens of thousands of dollars each year for magnets, covers, inside covers and back covers … I recommend this. (Exception: if the primary demographic you’re hoping to reach is something like adults 60+, then the phone book might be a great place to invest)
I’ve been doing marketing and promotion inside local television stations for more than a decade. Nearly everything we do is highly perishable, especially in the linear broadcast. It must affect my mindset, because two instances today – neither especially profound – open-hand slapped me in the face with the idea of permanence.
These instances immediately took me back to a Vaynerchuk take (find it at 19:30) on staying mindful of the fact that our great great grandchildren will be able to see much of what we do.
Instance 1: The final button on an interesting little case study by Darren Dahl in Inc. about a legal and PR crisis faced by Tagged. I won’t go into the details of the saga, brief as it was, and will instead go straight to the closing quote. “‘In the age of Google, bad press stays forever,’ says (CEO Greg) Tseng. ‘This incident will be a part of Tagged’s legacy forever.'”
Instance 2: A blog post from Alexandra Levit titled “Google is Forever,” in which she runs down a young man’s persistent haunting by the press generated by a wildly anti-gay Facebook page he started with blind, youthful enthusiasm in his college days. You can delete the page, but you can’t delete the press. He professes great embarrassment it now and alleges it’s prevented him from being hired recently. (Note: the post was brought to my attention by Dan Schawbel)
The takeaway: We’re building our legacy every day, one decision at a time. Whatever’s online is testimony to that legacy.
And just for fun … a 3 year old rant (and I mean rant in the best way) on legacy vs currency:
If you read magazines like Wired or Inc. (yes, both still appear in print on actual paper), you may have noticed offers from Google and Facebook on those little pull-out/fall-out cards that are annoyingly tucked, glued or stapled into just about every magazine.
The offers are basically identical and provide a unique code to cash in for $75 in Google Adwords or $50 in Facebook Ads. It’s a smart way for each company to invite prospects into their easy and cost-effective ad systems. It’s free money for me and wholly trackable sampling for them.
My set-it-and-forget-it Facebook ad for "Ivywild Neighborhood - Colorado Springs"
My approach was smart from the start, but lazy through the finish (I never A/B tested or adjusted any copy or imagery). I set up the ad to target people who:
Why Bristol? They’ve got the biggest Facebook fanbase – by far – of any neighborhood business (about 3,500). Along with The Blue Star and J Gregory Salon, Bristol is also right across the street from the sign that marks, declares and names the neighborhood. I used this familiar sign as the primary image in the ad; it’s also the primary profile picture of the community page.
The ad clicked through to the Info section of the Ivywild community page, which defines the purpose of the page, the informal boundaries of the neigbhorhood and a touch of history. I favored this over the wall, because the page has limited user interaction at this point; it isn’t as “alive” as I’d like it to be.
I set it up as a cost per click campaign with a budget of $5 per day. I let it run past the 10 free days and ended up paying $15 out of pocket.
Campaign results (rounded):
180,000 impressions with a click through rate of 0.06%
50,000 “social impressions” with a click through rate of 0.094%
Total clicks of 110 / Total “social clicks” of 48
Total CPC of $0.59 / Total CPM of $0.35
97 fans before the campaign, 163 at the conclusion of the campaign
60% conversion rate (66 fans from 110 clicks)
Cost per conversion of about $1
Facebook’s social metrics refer to impressions that include the names of people to whom you’re connected who already like the page. As seen in the results above, the social piece is pretty powerful. Though they accounted for 28% of the impressions, they accounted for 44% of the clicks.
This free, simple effort grew the page 68%. It was fun, easy and interesting.
I recommend you pull the offer out of a magazine on a newsstand today … unless they’re only running it with paid subscribers (all the better for tracking and measuring), in which case I won’t advocate you pulling the offer from a magazine in someone’s mail box.
Earlier, in my brief examination of social whoring, I included a mention of “who” being more important than “how many.” The basic idea: 10 Twitter followers truly locked in to you – your persona, your concept, your product, your service or your brand – are more valuable than 1,000 followers who are just hanging on for the follow-back. Not genius, but fundamental and oft overlooked.
For several months, I’ve been watching This Week In Startups with Jason Calacanis. This morning, I realized that a) I should bring this excellent, entertaining production to your attention and b) it perfectly illustrates the idea.
Regarding TWiST itself: It’s a YouTube channel under the This Week In web TV network. It’s a round table format about – obviously – startup companies, entrepreneurship, venture capital, angel investing, founders, CEOs, etc.
Regarding who versus how many: Dozens of the episodes (of which there are 120 or so) have fewer than 100 views. Most have views in the 100-1,000 range. A handful of views are in the 2,000+ range. Total subscribers … 402. Note: this does NOT take into account the live audience of each show.
A traditional take on these kinds of numbers – unimpressive. A local television station provides 2,000 simultaneous views for even poorly-watched programs. Though insanely inane, other YouTube channels have far greater reach – like ShaneDawsonTV2 with 250,000,000+ video views and 1,600,000+ subscribers.
So how do Calacanis and company land sponsorship from leading software companies like email service provider Mail Chimp? (Note: my ESP of choice is BombBomb, who’s putting video inside the inbox). Those few hundred subscribers and few thousand viewers represent a tight, high quality community of entrepreneurs, tech/web people, investors and financiers. It’s probably as dense a concentration of these types as you can reach.
I guarantee that buy isn’t on an old school cost per thousand basis. I’d also bet that if you looked at the sponsorship (however it’s structured) on a CPM basis, the CPM would be astronomical compared to most online buys. There’s a premium on concentrations of smart, shrewd, softwarey people. Yes, I made that last adjective up.
The point? Sure, more viewers and subscribers would be good for TWiST, but who makes up that audience is far more important than how many there are.
Here’s an embed of a recent episode with Tony Conrad, co-founder of About.Me (sold to AOL for $800M four days after launch) among many other projects and successes. If for no other reason, you should watch this to learn how the About.Me team lined up that killer url – obviously a fundamental piece of their overall strategy.
As a business, television is obviously being disrupted on at least two sides. On the viewership side, lifestyle and technology changes mean less and less appointment viewing (and commercial watching). On the revenue side, pure play internet companies with wholly measurable and cost effective solutions are creating far more competition for local advertising dollars.
In the face of this, I’m fond of saying that people will always seek and find great content and money will always seek and find people. There are, however, several significant distribution, cost structure and business model hurdles standing in front of traditional broadcasters and publishers.
Where do you look for ideas and inspiration when in need of new business models due to fundamentally disruptive threat in and around your industry? Perhaps to a former Harvard Business School innovation and entrepreneurship scholar who’s since gone real world.
Based on his involvement at Harvard and in the Newspaper Next project, Gilbert makes two fundamental points about disruptive innovation. First, only 9% of companies in disrupted industries survive the shift. Let’s be generous and double that; still, fewer than one in five traditional broadcasters and publishers will survive if historical trends hold. Second, a necessary precursor to that survival is the establishment of a separate division, physical location, profit/loss statements, sales team, content team, technology team, etc. The teams should include a significant portion of “outsiders” to the traditional, disrupted industry.
Walking the talk, Gilbert now heads up the newspaper, radio, television and digital operations of Deseret Media, which is owned by the LDS church. Certainly, the Mormon connection provides several advantages, like an automatic, worldwide audience that trusts you implicitly. Regardless, he provides a ton of excellent insight in this presentation.
Because it’s a local mobile advertising conference, Gilbert covers well SMS, mobile/geo and deals programs. In addition, though, he covers his entire turf, including the insanely well-trafficked KSL.com, among other properties.
One of the more interesting themes that runs through his full presentation is mindset, semantics, framing – changing the way you talk about something in order to change the way you perceive, understand and think about it. Listen for key phrases that he repeats to help re-frame things toward a new perception or understanding.
I highly recommend the full version, but I can only embed here the 5-minute highlights edit posted to YouTube:
Borrell used this nice content tease on YouTube to drive traffic into his site for the full presentation, which can be seen here.
Here’s a content breakdown, so you can choose an appropriate in-point, should your time be limited:
1:20 The Newspaper Next project – how disruption happened in the past, historical look, put in context of newspapers
4:10 Gilbert starts, gives up on newspapers/media, refusing to learn, 10 years of communicating same message
6:10 Digital assets – what’s under his control as CEO of Deseret Media
6:45 Parallel story of disruption in another industry (mainframe, minicomputer, personal computer)
9:30 Waves of disruption, historical media trends
10:50 Empirical evidence that’s overwhelming, inarguable and irrefutable – in the face of a disruptive threat, you must have a separate division, location, p/l, sales force, content teams, etc.
12:00 Success rate of responding to predictive threat is 9%
15:30 Red Sox Nation effect – what the web allows
17:15 KSL.com stats
18:15 How he built his team
19:30 Strategy is never more than 49% of the solution
21:30 Symbiotic relationship between trust in news product and relevance in online marketplace – driving traffic
23:30 SMS – old technology, standard across platforms, local market spend forecast
26:00 Self-serve model beneficial and NECESSARY
29:00 “Deals” strategy, why you must have one
31:10 Why disruptive technology isn’t disruptive to customers who adopt it
33:30 Why Groupon, LivingSocial and other deals advertisers are vampires or leeches
39:15 Private labeling their deals program
40:00 Only legacy asset he inherited … brand trust
42:45 Why they’re selective about deals partners – don’t take all comers – elements of good partnership
45:30 How Google ruined relationship selling
48:00 Organizational structure required to live through disruptive innovation
49:45 Q&A starts
50:10 Groupon, fund raising and brand building
53:30 TV versus radio in driving subscribers to deal signups
55:00 How the sales team is organized
56:45 Cannibalization of other digital products by deals products? No Traditional media obsesses here
58:00 Digital content production – traditional journalists’ inability to decouple story telling from medium
01:00:00 Ramping up investment in digital media
01:03:30 On trust
01:05:15 Elements, factors and design of partnerships between 3rd parties and media properties
01:09:30 Optimism for media companies
Again, I highly recommend viewing the entire piece. I’ve done so several times.
If you’re inclined, please share here anything you enjoyed, disputed or wondered about Gilbert’s presentation.
