Setting Up a Home 3: Choosing a Name

Choosing a name for a corporate blog is an imporant step. It’s more than just choosing a clever title that folks can relate to or that might relate to the corporate site. Four things need to top the priority list of the folks who have been listening into the conversations in the blogosphere about the enterprise.

1. Search engine searchability. How will folks find the blog for the very first time? To choose a name that will work, find blogs that do what the new blog will do, then do a Google search to find them. Keep track of the search engine terms that are used. Those are the terms that new readers will use to find the new corporate blog. The list of terms that is made should be key in informing the name of the blog.

2. Call the blog what it is. Cute is fun. Accurate works. Make sure the title includes all key words that tell what the blog is about. “Snapshots” for a Kodak blog will only take things so far. “Snapshots, Digital talk, and Kodak Innovations of Every Type” will draw more readers.

3. The title should reflect passion, fun, expertise, and authority in the industry. That is, after all, what the blog will be about, isn’t it?

4. Start with the adult concerns. Return to their kid concerns. When a short list of names is reached, compare that to the groups of desired customers you wish to reach. What are those customer needs, desires and secret wishes? Does the title offer a promise of those? Then review the short list from a child-like/fun point of view. What senses — sights, sounds feelings — correspond to the key customer groups positive interactions with the company’s products? Can those “intangibles” be woven into the title? The Mazda commercial that uses “Zoom, Zoom,” is the best example of appealing to the kid in customers in a very long time.

Hit the mark with people and search engines on both adult and kid levels and you have a hands down winner of a blog title. No kidding.

Ask your customers.They’ll tell you what resonates with them. You’ll hear the smile in the comments they write.

Liz Strauss