Credit: bensheldon
I’ve owned the mobsterlobster.com domain for about 5 years (not counting a 1 year gap where I forgot to renew it and some unscrupulous despot snatched it up to fill it with an auto-generated page of adverts about sea food restaurants), so when I decided to start a software development business, it seemed like as good a name as any to use since I already had the domain name.
What I didn’t factor into my considerations was that today’s Internet isn’t about just having your own site. If you’re planning on building up any kind of following for your brand, you need a presence on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube at the very least and probably several other social media sites. Too late in the day I realised that somebody else had the Twitter handle mobsterlobster, and my plea for the rightful owner to hand it over fell on deaf ears (which is absolutely fair – I have no claim whatsoever to the name). Due to length restrictions on Twitter, my next choice (mobsterlobsterapps) was not an option so I was left with the rather lame mlobster handle I’m now using.
If that wasn’t annoying enough, both mobsterlobster and mlobster were already taken on YouTube so I went back to the mobsterlobsterapps handle that I wanted for Twitter, so now I have three variants of the company name. Then I went over to Facebook to sort my presence out over there and that situation is just a mess in it’s own right.
Facebook lets you create what it calls a “page” to promote your business (which is actually a great deal more than a page), but it stops short of allowing you to do most of the useful things you might want to do with it. Recently Facebook started allowing users to create “vanity” URLs for their personal profiles which look something like facebook.com/myname, but they have not extended this feature to where it would be really useful – in promoting businesses. Needless to say, somebody has already snatched up the one I wanted, facebook.com/mobsterlobster, not that I would have been able to use it anyway. So I’m stuck with http://www.facebook.com/pages/Mobster-Lobster/111282171221 for my Facebook presence. Great. That one just rolls of the tongue doesn’t it?
None of this represents a major problem exactly, it just somewhat dilutes the brand identity. My brand is worth nothing at all right now as I’m just starting out but I’m hoping that won’t always be the case and already I’m regretting the choices I made with the company name. I’ve always liked coined names like “Pixoria”, “Expedia”, “Reebok” etc which don’t have any meaning at all outside of the company name, but those names have another very distinct advantage: unless somebody else has already used the name (in which case you shouldn’t be using it anyway), it’s a safe bet that all related domain names and “handles” on social networking sites will be available for the taking. Next time I’m picking a company name, that’s the way I’ll be going.
Tags: Business, company name, facebook, mobsterlobster, social media, twitter, web 2.0
