Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.
By Sasha Pasulka
Lord knows enough articles have been written about how to choose a product name. I’m no expert (as this piece will deftly illustrate), and I don’t have much to add to the body of online work that counsels you on how to choose names people can spell, visualize, remember, and don’t mean something in a foreign language that you’d never say in front of your grandmother.
I’ve been working with the team at CrowdMap for almost six months now. We have a great product, a great dev team, some really exciting features to release in the next month, and CrowdMap got a write-up on the New York Times blog.
The only problem?
It wasn’t our CrowdMap.
The other CrowdMap, which launched in August, is a “crisis-mapping” tool based on technology that culls data from messages in cellphones, news reports and the Web. The technology was originally built in response to the violent aftermath of the 2007 Kenyan elections, allowing people to post reports of violence anonymously. It was called Ushahidi back then – CrowdMap is the platform’s Web interface, and there’s already international buzz about its humanitarian potential.
Aside from a few days of disproportionately high sales of our app – no doubt courtesy of people who were looking for the other CrowdMap – this has been a total headache for our brand. Every mention on Twitter is about the other CrowdMap (and they own @crowdmap). Every Google alert is about the other CrowdMap. Every email to our community listserv is about … you guessed it … the other CrowdMap.
When the product was created, we knew that CrowdMap.com was taken, but it was a basic “under construction” page at the time. We knew that @crowdmap was taken, but it wasn’t being used. We just didn’t think any of it was a big deal … until all this happened. Now we wish we’d thought it through a little more rigorously.
It’s easy as a brilliant developer to think that your product will be so damn game-changing that people will find it by any name, to look askance at URLs and Twitters and Facebooks as the concern of the lesser social media minds. But there’s always the possibility of somebody equally brilliant working on an equally stealth product by the same name … and then it turns out that his is going to help end violence in the third world.
Whoops.
Here are some tips, and I beg you to take them seriously, even though they may sound basic:
1) Get the .com.
2) Get the Twitter handle.
3) Get the Facebook page.
4) Make sure your product’s website can be in the top three results of the SERP for your product name.
5) If you fail on any of rules 1-4, choose a new product name, sooner rather than later.
In the meantime, if you have exciting new name suggestions for a real-time collaborative mindmapping tool — names that won’t have to compete with any products that are actively saving the world — drop me a line.
