The Twitter Effect

The struggle to create the next perfectly weird company name

By Eric Spitznagel

What's in a name? If it happens to be Twitter, the answer is roughly $1.1 billion. In just four years, Twitter has gone from birdsong to the most used word in the English language, according to Global Language Monitor data for 2009. ("Obama" was a close second.) Twitter spokesman Matt Graves explains that his company's insipidly brilliant name was "the result of a brainstorm between a small group of employees at Odeo, the San Francisco podcasting startup where Twitter initially began as a side project. They came up with possible names, including 'Jitter' and 'Twitter,' and put them in a hat," Graves says. Twitter won.

Now the race is on to coin the next weirdly memorable company name. The challenge is that coming up with something as powerful as Verizon (VZ) or Häagen-Dazs (GIS) (made-up words that have entered the cultural lexicon), let alone Google (GOOG) (the founders' own misspelling of the numerical term "googol"), has become even harder. There are more than a million names, slogans, and logos registered at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. And according to VeriSign (VRSN), a global domain name registry company, 11 million Internet domain names have been registered in the last 12 months alone, a 6 percent increase from the year before. In all, 193 million Internet domain names are now unavailable to new businesses.

"The days of accidental naming are over," says Naseem Javed, the founder of ABC Namebank, a New York-based consultant specializing in corporate nomenclature. To stand out in the overcrowded global marketplace, he says, a company's name must now be especially odd. "Ten, twenty years ago you could start a business and take the name in any direction," he says. "Now, with 200 countries on the cyber-platform around the globe, finding the right name has become an expert's field."

More companies than ever are seeking professional advice about their identities. Although client numbers are hard to come by, there are some 50 naming firms worldwide, the majority of them launched within the last decade, according to DMOZ, the Open Directory Project, the Internet's largest yellow pages. "It's just like modern art," says Phillip Davis, president and owner of Tungsten Branding, a business-naming firm in Brevard, N.C. "I study words. I live inside words. What could they become, what could they be shaped into, are they malleable?" He takes his profession very seriously. "In our industry, we call [words] a partially shaped vessel."

One of the most popular recent naming trends, according to Javed, is the Google-derived double-O. "A lot of companies feel that the double-O gives them some kind of comfort level," he says. "You have names like Joost, Boost, Wakoopa, iSkoot, and Qool." According to Javed, there is a guiding principle in the double-O strategy. "Basically, you put the double-O in the center, and then you drop one letter on the left and one letter on the right," he says. "Hopefully it gives you some magic." By ABC's estimate, there are approximately 760 double-o company names around the world.

The true art of corporate naming is to be weird—but not too weird. Jay Jurisich, creative director at San Francisco-based naming and branding agency Igor, points to the array of companies that seem to have been assigned a random combination of letters: Xignux, Epizon, Spansion, Assurant, Primaxis, Qorus. "While every snowflake is technically unique," Jurisch says, "in a blizzard they all blend together and become indistinguishable."

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