5 Social Media Tactics If Your B2B Company Name is a Common Word
By Jeffrey L. Cohen
Wed, Feb 3, 2010
If your B2B company is more than three or four years old, but less than 15, all you ever had to think about regarding your company name was could you secure a good web address. Most B2B companies did not concern themselves with the type of words that made up their company name. Overall branding was a bigger issue for larger corporations, and you could always add inc or web or even a dash to your web address to make it unique. And with over 250 characters to work with, domain names could definitely exceed any practical or functional limit. But add the social web to the mix and those limits are much smaller. For example a Twitter username can only be a maximum of 15 characters, due to its origination as an SMS (text) service.
And at the beginning of the Web 2.0 era, services commonly dropped vowels to have unique, short names that had a corresponding domain. This was the first time B2B companies thought about the uniqueness of their names, and wondered how they could join the social web with a long name made up of common nouns, like Data Integration Specialists.
1. Build Off Your Domain Name Branding
Everything you do on the web is part of your branding. The day you registered your domain name, that was your first step in branding, and you want to continue that on the social web. Let’s say your company is called Gears and your domain name is GearsInc.com or GearsMfg.com (both real companies). This should become your online brand. Your Twitter ID should be @GearsInc. And other social profiles should be GearsInc, as well, which starts to build brand equity.
2. Create Content Around Phrases
If you search for a common term like gears, most of the top results are for video games, movies and even general expressions, like get it in gear. If your common noun company name is also a general product, always make sure you pair it with descriptors that customers and prospectors would search for. These are things like industries, materials or applications. These more specific terms will actually drive better search results.
3. Find Related Terms
By combining your own search results with the Google Keyword Tool, you can find terms similar to your company name that fill people’s search queries. These terms may be more available, less common and better in the suggested combinations than a word like gears. These related terms should be used across all content, whether it is the corporate web site, blog, press releases, social sites and niche forums.
4. Monitoring Industry Leaders
As you begin monitoring the web for your brand and products using free tools like Google Alert or Twitter search, you will quickly discover that you have very few relevant results. This means you need to develop more robust monitoring programs that follow industry leaders or even customers who are likely to mention to your company. While you need to be aware of any mentions of your company, they may be hard to find among the noise.
5. Social Web Outreach
As you are creating content on the social web and discovering relevant bloggers in your industry, begin reaching out to them to see if they are receptive to discussing your product or service. Creating more outlets for content, especially on highly-read blogs, will improve your brand awareness on the web. Approach each one individually and start a conversation before discussing your products. Makes sure you read what they write before doing this. Consider conducting an interview with them that you publish on your blog. They will probably post that to their network, which drives some awareness of your site.
What would you do differently today if you were naming a B2B company?
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Great ideas here. It is very common to have multiple companies with the same names, too. One more idea is to search the company name plus the location, which has given me more results.
@NathanRKing
Great stuff, Jeff. We have a related problem in that our official name is SAS Institute, Inc., but we have been branding ourselves for several years as just SAS. As you can imagine, there are hundreds and hundreds of SASs out there. I’m starting to see the value behind all those odd, made-up company names from the ’90s like Synertasticity or Optimilevera.
Nathan and David: Thanks for the comments and the additional examples. This is another example of how the branding landscape continues to change as new platforms are released. There is no telling what the naming requirements will be for a company in 5 years. And we didn’t even talk about the global economy, and thinking how names read, and resonate, in countries outside the US.