I'm glad you led with that one, because I'm constantly asking that very question. Note to website designers: DON'T MAKE ME USE WIKIPEDIA TO FIGURE OUT WTF THE COMPANY DOES!
Unfortunately, quite a few companies aren't even in Wikipedia (of course they should get themselves added). That's the point when I simply give up. Life is too short.
It's not as simple as that. You have to meet notability requirements or your page is just going to get deleted.
And if you are unable to do so without using the word Solutions you probably aren't sure yourself.
Seriously, so much this. I cannot even count the number of emails I receive along the lines of “We’re happy to let you know that we have launched macaroni.io" or some other crazy name that tells you nothing about what the product or service is.
Just take ONE sentence at the beginning of these emails to remind people what you do. Especially if they are not already users of your site and your goal is to get them to become users / customers.
More specifically: a good practice for those who interact with the media frequently is to have bios of varying lengths. Usually one sentence, a brief paragraph, a longer paragraph, and a full-length bio. Another alternative is to write a multi-paragraph description in traditional newspaper "inverted tree" format (most general to most specific), with increasing detail in subsequent paragraphs.
Select from this to clip to length for various materials as part of your standard media / press kit.
Thanks for the book reference. Similar observations by Lave and Wenger in a more academic style
http://infed.org/mobi/jean-lave-etienne-wenger-and-communiti...
I do think you have a blog post here as others have suggested.
Question on a related subject - what about product names? Better to name your product/site/company/whatever a simple, boring name that is descriptive of what your product does, like foobarer for something that bars your foo, or something that is short, vague, and cutesy, but hopefully more memorable than the simple, descriptive name, like twitter or the article's ramen? Or rather, any thoughts on the tradeoffs involved?
I'd actually prefer to avoid either the utterly boring generic name (in the sense of something that's not readily searchable or differentiable), or something overly descriptive: "Facebook" may well prove to be a liability in another ten years (assuming the company survives), if the present "social network" mania has faded or moved on, and the company with it.
Other than that: beware of short acronyms which might be adopted by others. "SAS" is an airline, a shoe company, a special operations force, a hard drive specification (now obsolete), an environmental activist group, a homonym for an online application provisioning technology ... and the name of the largest privately held software company in the US.
The worst possible case I can think of is "R", a statistics software package, by way of command abbreviations, UNIX traditions, and free-software in-jokes. "S" was the stats package for AT&T's UNIX, a quickly typeable command a'la 'ls', 'rm', 'cc', 'vi', etc. "R" was "iterated S" as a free software project. It actually survives pretty well as a search term, though only for its popularity -- trying to break out now would likely be difficult.
Microsoft isn't a bad name (though overly descriptive), but many of its product names ("Word", "Windows", "Server", "SQL Server", "Outlook", "Exchange") are hard to differentiate. Even its most significant product offering, NT, was at the time predominantly associated with a Canadian telecoms concern, since bankrupted.
Though brief, IBM is spectacularly resilient, as is its description, "International Business Machines". SUN, the Stanford University Network, did pretty well. "Apple", despite being relatively generic, is distinctive in its space. I'm partial to companies named for people, if only indirectly: RSA was an exception in the IT space, though New Relic is an anagram of its founder and CEO's name, Lew Cerne. If nothing else it suggests a possible long-term investment by the founder, though there's some risk: Debian outlived Deborah and Ian's marriage.
"Google" as a made-up word has survived pretty well, and can even transition (assuming trust in the company does) outside search. "Cisco" for routers strikes me as good. "Salesforce.com" seems to me to be ripe for a renaming eventually, as "dot com" anything still carries (for me at least) a taint of the get-rich-quick schemes of the late 1990s. I see either "Salesforce" or "SFC" in its future. "Peoplesoft" was similarly limited. "Oracle" took its name from a government project. Most of these are robust names, though each effectively created its brand image by filling an empty vessel. On the other hand, "Computer Associates" is so generic (and tainted as "where software goes to die) as to be pejorative.
Outside heavy manufacturing or specific service industries requiring specialization (e.g., transport, airlines, hospitality), I'd tend to avoid a very strong product tie. "General Motors" has worked fairly well, "Xerox" isn't too bad. Software and services tend to be more ... fluid.
"Lenovo" doesn't mean anything to me other than "sells IBM kit I like", but I can find their website (if not anything on it once I'm there). "Apache" was an in-joke to slapdash development efforts, "vim" a one-letter extension to a two-letter command. "Chrome" seems to me to be getting overloaded with meanings (is it a browser, an OS, an "environment", whatever that is)? I suspect Android may be shed at some point as overly techy, though I could be wrong on that. "AWK" is another founder's name. "C" is another don't-do-that-but-it-worked single-letter name, and also something of a line of jokes: BCPL -> B -> C -> C++, C#, C--, D.
There's also the case of names which are meant to be hard to remember or recall: "Xe Services" (formerly Blackwater, now Academi), Altria Group (formerly Philip Morris Companies). Collections agencies often operate under extremely generic names which defy both recollection and search ("Prestige Services"). Another favorite for reasons of obscurity is "Various, Inc.", once described as a photo-oriented relationship networking organization. Bail bondsmen like to be the first name in the book -- easy to find in a time of pressing need. Pick your name to suit your goals for noteriety or not.uuuuuuuu
If you go back through history there are trends in company names: place and description (New York Times, Pennsylvania Oil, Bethlehem Steel), founder(s) (Woolworths, Westinghouse, Pullman, Johnson Wax), size or generality (IBM, GE, NCR, NBC), mythology or culture (Mazda -- both lights and motorcars, Ajax, CBS). In the 1920s, airlines were popular, though these referred to rail companies, as were radio companies (the dot-coms of the day). In the 1960s, everything was "-onic" as transistors hit the scene. TLAs blossomed in the 1970s and 1980s, as did made-up words, often based on trademark considerations. Later .com, e-whatever, i-whatever, and Whatevr in the 2000s, which all seem dated now.
A few bits I've noticed over 25+ years in the industry:
• Tell me what your product is. What it does, where it works, how it does it, what it requires. Is it a physical product (or is it shipped in one), an interactive application, a Web service, a programming language / tool?
• Tell me what the fuck it is EVERY GODDAMNED TIME YOU COMMUNICATE ABOUT THE PRODUCT. It doesn't have to be long or detailed, you can link to your detailed description in the communication. But your press releases, emails, Tweets, blog posts, marketing collateral, etc., are going to get passed around, word-of-mouthed, and/or pulled out of drawers (or browser history / searches) for weeks, months, and years to come. Make them work for you.
• The Economist's practice of briefly introducing any individual, no matter how famous or obscure, is a wonderful practice of microcontent contextualization. "Using the Economist house style offers an elegant alternative, wherein virtually all people and organizations are identified explicitly, no matter how prominent. For example, you might see 'Google, a search giant', 'GE, an American conglomerate', or 'Tim Cook, boss of Apple'." http://redd.it/1x8yky
• Tell me how to try it out. Preferably for 60-90 days (a 30 day cycle can go far too fast. I've been very, very impressed with New Relic's "use it for free, convert upmarket for additional features" model, and it's apparently worked well for them. For small accounts, their cost of sales is effectively nil (and for large accounts, COS is always a PITA). But for those large accounts, you've got a proven track record with the prospect, and they really know what they're getting.
• Put your tech docs front and center. As a technical lead / director, my questions are "how the fuck do I make this thing work", and if you can't tell me
• It's been observed many times that those who have the best appreciation for how a product works are those who use it directly, and secondly, those who either service it or support those using it. John Sealy Brown's The Social Life of Information addresses this with both Xerox copier repairmen and support staff. Use this to your advantage two ways: let these people share and collaborate, even if informally For the repairmen, this was a morning coffee break turned out to be a hugely valuable cross-training and troubleshooting feature. For phone support, after an "expert system" and changes in technology separating phone reps from technicians, researchers noted two reps who consistently provided good advice: one was a veteran from the earlier stage, the other a recent hire who sat across from the other and learned from her. Similarly, user support groups (mailing lists, Web forums, Usenet groups), in which users interact and share knowledge with one another directly (Hacker News would be an instance) are often (though not always) far more useful than direct tech support.
• Provide clear pricing information. This has been noted from Jacob Nielsen on forward as the information people are most interested in.
• Make damned sure that whatever process or workflow you've created online works, and for as many possible end-user environments as possible. Keeping interfaces as simple and legible as possible is a huge bonus.
• Remove distractions from your transactional webpages. Once someone's homed in on a product, focus on that, though you may mention alternatives or (truly useful) related products. Every additional piece of information on the screen is an opportunity to confuse and lose the sale. I've been restyling many websites simply for my own use (1000+), and simply removing distracting elements produces a far more productive environment.
• Ensure your pages are legible. Backgrounds should be light, foregrounds light (and where, with extreme reluctance, you invert these, separation should be clear). DO NOT SCALE FONTS IN PX. On far, far too many devices this renders as unreadable, particularly from older (e.g., more senior w/in the organization) readers. Grey-on-grey is just cause to fire whomever suggested or required it. See ContrastRebellion: http://www.contrastrebellion.com/
• Don't organize your website according to internal corporate structures. Your website is an outward facing tool, and should address the needs of users, not of internal departments. Lenovo's laptop site organization would be highly typical of this: I want a Linux-capable, large-display, full-keyboard, trackpoint device. The rest I generally don't give a shit about, and its product line confuses me every fucking goddamned time I try to buy something there (usually every 2-3 years). I'm not a sufficiently frequent customer that I keep up with every last change, but I've spent thousands of dollars on IBM/Lenovo products, as an individual (hundreds of thousands to millions as an enterprise customer).
And of course: test all of this, don't simply take my word for it. But yes, I've walked from far, far, far too many product pages, from free software projects to Fortune 10 companies to edgy app devs.
Life's too fucking short for that shit.