Kyle
South By Southwest Interactive 2013 is less than two weeks away and for those of us who are actually going to attend the great panel sessions, keynotes and workshops held throughout downton Austin there’s a great one, no startup wants to miss.
archer>malmo our creative agency and an equity holder in nibletz media, through their am>ventures arm, is holding a panel discussion at the Four Seasons entitled “When Bad Names Happen To Good Startups”
Last August when the SXSWi committee took suggestions for panels archer>malmo submitted this panel that is a must attend for all startups.
archer>malmo has been around over 60 years, and is one of the largest and most widely respected firms located off Madison Avenue. They’ve worked with Fortune 100 companies and some of the top brands in the world including Verizon, Pfizer and RJ Reynolds.
archer>malmo has taken an interest and startups and created an investment arm called am>ventures, for which nibletz is a portfolio company. This experience, working with new entrepreneurs and companies, prompted the creative minds at archer>malmo to start talking about names.
Sometimes entrepreneurs and startup founders don’t fully consider the ramifications of their new name. Many startup founders go for a name based on a creative URL while others use a name ripe for great SEO. Still others have other reasons for a name, like nibletz.
When we originally created nibletz it was a companion site to thedroidguy.com and the original idea was to deliver capsulated tech and startup news. The tag line came first when I thought of the name. “Small Crunchy Bytes From The Tech & Startup Scene” was the line I had come up with. I took it to our massive “Thedroidguy” Twitter following at the time and more than 100 followers suggested the word niblets.
We found that niblets meant corn so we changed the S to a Z. At that time we didn’t look at the Urban Dictionary of the word. In fact it wasn’t until we cleared the 50,000 mark on social followers (we’re now at 130,000) that I bothered to look at the Urban Dictionary meaning (go check for yourself).
Another great story about names came by way of a demo day graduation at Chattanooga’s Gig Tank over the summer. The startup was called Corpora. I was writing a story during their live pitch and while one of our staffers was editing video I began to write but I needed a graphic. So I did what anyone would do and went to Google Images. (now go do it for yourself), pretty bad huh.
These things happen all the time and we don’t want to spoil any of the panel so you should check it out and then decide if you’re too invested to create a better name.
The panel will be hosted by archer>malmo’s Chief Creative Officer Gary Backaus and Senior Copy Writer Justin Dobbs.
Check out our interview with Dobbs about the panel below to get more insight:
archer>malmo was a sponsor of everywhereelse.co 2013 and a presenting corporate sponsor for everywhereelse.co 2014 get your tickets here.
