The 7 Biggest Mistakes to Avoid When Naming Your Business

Choosing a name for your business is a crucial step in starting a company, and there are many mistakes you can make. A great business name is unique but easy to remember, and it should be able to carry your business into a profitable future. And because choosing a name for your company is so important, you want to avoid the most common mistakes.

1. Using a Name that's Less Available than an Uber on New Year's Eve.
Is the name you're considering already in use or otherwise unavailable? If it's already registered or used as a trademark by another company, you may not be able to use it. Check with the United States Patent & Trademark Office's website to see if a trademark is currently registered, although just because it's not listed on the USPTO's website, doesn't mean that it's available.

Trademarks can be Common Law, resulting from use, or Federal, resulting from both use and federal registration. In other words, trademarks don't need to be registered to be used as trademarks. Because of this, it's almost always a good idea to pay a company like Thomson Reuters to perform a comprehensive trademark search before filing an application.

The other consideration is whether the related domain name is available. (You can check availability by searching on GoDaddy.com or another domain registrar.) And yet, just because a domain name isn't available doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't use it. For example, Tesla doesn't own tesla.com, and yet, when you hear just that word, you likely think of Elon Musk's Tesla Motors.

2. Putting Your Secret Sauce in the Name.
Don't put your company's services, products or ingredients in the name. First, as your business grows and evolves (and it will), you may lose the interest of your customers or wage a losing battle to overcome dated notions of what it is you sell. CompUSA faced this issue and eventually saw its demise. RadioShack has also struggled to remain relevant as mp3 players and smartphones have taken hold.

Secondly, when you put general product or service descriptors in your company's name, you may face an uphill battle in obtaining robust federal trademark for your business. U.S. Federal Trademark laws provide significantly greater protection to non-descriptive, distinctive trademarks.

The United States Patent & Trademark Office can refuse to register your trademarkon its Principal Register if the trademark on the application includes words deemed "merely descriptive." This means words that describe an ingredient, quality, characteristic, function, feature, purpose, or use of the specified goods or services. In 1986, "Bed & Breakfast Registry" was denied trademark registration because it was considered merely descriptive of the lodging reservations services the registrant offered. In 1987, "Apple Pie" was denied trademark registration for a brand of potpourri.

On the other hand, trademarks that are not descriptive of the products or services with which they are associated, can receive significant federal trademark protection. Because, for example, the word "apple" is not intrinsically associated with computers and electronic devices, Apple Inc.'s "Apple" trademark is afforded significant trademark protection. However, there is a fine line to walk between being distinctive and being too creative or obscure and irrelevant.

Additionally, you ought to avoid business-speak or buzzwords and clichés popular in general business forums. Think: Synergy, Leverage, and Apex. These terms can quickly lose all meaning and then you're left with an empty cliché of a name.

3. Letting the Name Grow Longer than Pinocchio's Nose.
The longer a name, the less chance that someone will be able to remember it. The most memorable brand names have one or two words. Think Amazon, Apple, Best Buy, and Wal-Mart. Even PricewaterhouseCoopers doesn't use its full name, but goes by PwC.

4. Don't Choose a Seven-Car Pile-up for Your Company's Moniker.
While it may once have been cool or innovative to smash together words, without spaces, to make a business moniker - we're looking at you, RadioShack - it isn't anymore. Don't AmeriTech yourself.

5. Keeping it Too Close to Home.
Including geographical descriptors in a business name can be restrictive if you want or plan to expand out of a particular geographic area. There really is a fine line to walk here. While putting the business's town, city or state in its name might limit potential growth, it can also add charm and help distinguish the company from similarly named businesses in other locations.

6. A Name that Even You Can't Spell Correctly.
Spell-check your name choice, please. When a company name is spelled incorrectly, it can cause potential partners, hires, prospects and customers to lose faith in your abilities. Even if you explain the misspelling, your audience might be forever turned off. Whose Your Landlord, a site that allows renters to give feedback on their landlord, explains what looks like the improper use of "whose" over "who's" as an intentional choice signifying a return of power to the renter. And yet, for grammar fanatics, the explanation falls short.

In addition to avoiding the use of a misspelled or grammatically incorrect name, you should also avoid a name that would be hard for others to spell correctly.

7. Not Testing.
Find out what a large, unbiased group thinks about your name before moving ahead with it. Find out what potential customers and clients think. Create a similar logo featuring the different names you're considering for your business and share it on social media. Or use an even more scientific method to test your brand name. You can do this by creating one landing page for each logo/name option and run a highly targeted Facebook ad to gather metrics on which name/logo gets the best response.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-cook/the-7-biggest-mistakes-to_b_6994470.html

Creating images for social media with Canva

Credit: By sayot on Flickr. Some rights reserved.

Posts with images on social networks often attract more engagement than text-based updates, so if you need to spruce up your social channels, posting more images is a good way to go about doing that.

But each social network has its own requirements in terms of format, and there's no one-size-fits-all for social networks.

There are a number of tools online that can help you create bespoke images for the various social networks journalists use to share their stories – Canva is one such platform.

It caters to users who need an easy way to design images in a number of styles, from Instagram or Facebook photos to Twitter headers and Pinterest images, and even email headers you could use in newsletters.

Many of Canva's design tools are free to use, and you can access most of its library of templates, fonts and even images for free. Certain elements however are paid-for, and usually cost $1 each (payable when you download your finished image).

You will need to create an account to use Canva, or log in with your Facebook account. Once you're in, you can choose the type of image you want to create from the pre-existing formats, or you can choose a custom size to work with if you're creating images for your site.


Screenshot from Canva.

Once you've chosen your size, you can find Canva's design options on the left hand side.

It automatically takes you to the 'layouts' tab, where you can find a number of free templates for images with quotes.

But you can also create your own from scratch, uploading your own images to Canva and using the "background" and "text" options.


Screenshot from Canva.

We tested the platform to create a basic image that could be used in a Twitter post, using a pull quote from our story Study: News outlets not doing enough to stop online rumours published last week.

The first step is to choose a background image or colour by clicking on the 'background' tab. The plus sign at the top opens up the colour wheel where you can find your preferred colours.

Alternatively, you can also choose one of the backgrounds provided, including free and patterned options.

Next, we uploaded the Journalism.co.uk logo, as a PNG with a transparent background, to add to our test image.

Canva allows you to either upload images from your computer, or use photos from your Facebook albums.

Once a photo is uploaded, you can drag and drop it onto your work-in-progress, resize it by dragging the corners of the image, and position it where needed within the frame.

There are plenty of ways to add text to your image, and the 'text' tab offers some basic title options as well as a number of designs if you'd like your text formatted in a more visual way.

For the quote in our image, a combination of the main title and subtitle features worked well enough, but you can also customise fonts and colours for free.

Here's the result:


Twitter image, resized to fit Journalism.co.uk site layout.

For more complex designs, or if you want to create infographics or illustrate statistics for social media, Canva has a number of icons and images you can use.

Click on the 'search' tab to access the platform's library of visuals, including shapes, maps, doughnut charts with percentages, and more icons to make your post stand out on social media.

Don't forget to represent your data accurately, and while Canva's design options are plentiful, don't overload your graphic. Check out these tips from freelance infographista Lulu Pinney on what makes infographics successful.

Once you're happy with your photo, you can download it or share it on Twitter, Facebook or email.

The Canva team also writes blog posts with useful tips for designing images for social media, general graphic design advice and more on their Design School blog.
https://www.journalism.co.uk/news/how-to-create-images-for-social-media-with-canva/s2/a564104/