A rose by any other name would smell as sweet…?

A couple of weeks ago we ran a crowdsourcing brainstorm initiative (which I like to call a crowdstorm) (bit.ly/whatsinacrowdstorm).

We laid out our focus and vision for the practice, and asked for voting on 3 possible names, with an option to submit new ones.

The aim was to establish the right name for our new consulting practice.  We hoped that we’d get some good contributions and ideas, and clarity on what to name the practice and we achieved both goals.

The challenge

We asked people to choose and suggest the best name for the new practice, given this overview of a marcomm & techcomm experienced content strategy practice [extract only]:

“Revenue and customer experience in B2B companies depend on delivering content that’s rich with product information – a (sometimes complex) mix of commercially compelling copy and images with feature details, diagrams and hard facts. Our practice helps these businesses succeed by helping them understand and leverage content assets they might not even have known they had.”

And these names:

• Urbina Consulting
• Omniplicity Consulting
• Multiplicity Consulting
• HolisticCS
• Other _____

Your submissions

My favorite sumbmission was “Dark Forest” consulting, which connected with the idea of being a trusted guide through the forest of options when it comes to techniques, strategies and technologies on the market.  Elodie wasn’t so keen, and as you’ll see below, it ended up not mattering.

I should have expected, from my network especially, that some people would poke some fun, and you didn’t disappoint.  We especially liked these two:

And possibly a serious one, “Urbane Consulting” for “sophisticated content” was inspired:

The Final Result

In the end, the results were very slanted:

I even had some people email me privately to add extra weight to their survey responses.  The overall gist is summed up by Al Martine who told us that the 13 years I’ve invested in building my name should be leveraged:

Some other small/independent consultants told me that they agonized over names only to find that they were duly ignored by their clients. It’s a logical argument and the reason that Urbina Consulting was on the list, and it turns out a clear majority think this way.

The other 3 names were good, and we particularly liked HolisticCS, but someone pointed out that the two “c”s were a potential area for disaster.

Thank you for your participation

It’s been great to get the engagement in our first months and thanks for everyone’s input. It was a fun exercise for sure, and even if the winnig name is the most straight-forward of the options, often being straightforward and simple is the way to go.  I hope you wish us luck, and if you’re in need of some content strategy assistance, now you know how to refer to us when reaching out to make contact.

This has made for a very appropriate first blog post for UrbinaConsulting.com.  Now I feel I wasted money squatting those other domains!

There’s lots of work to be done on the new site but it’s got the core ideas. Comments are always invited. Some of our favourite post need some tweaking before they’ll show up in this new template and I’m sure we’ve got some duff links still sticking around!