Names are important and we did not pluck it out of thin air.  We actually thought about it for a long 'time'.  We felt our readers might want to know, because it's an interesting story and it might help some other people thinking about starting a small business, especially if it is Internet based..

• Since we have no pretentions about being an international news source, we knew we needed a local name.  News source names have a storied history like 'Reuters' (which is a bad  name as you will see^*)
• Since we are serving the Saugeen watershed, we needed a name that encompasses the area in a single word.

The above two reasons are not the most important though.  We needed an Internet Name.... we are a pure Internet business.  What the heck is an Internet name?  Here is what it is:

• Saugeen's spelling is not confused with other spellings and even if it is, Google will figure it out, because it is a RARE name.  It so happens that the word 'SAUGEEN' is easy to spell correctly for EVERYONE in the very local area that we serve because the Saugeen wends it's way throughout almost every community in the area or the roads that the residents have to traverse.
• When you put Saugeen Times into Google, you see that we are #1 in the list. 
• If you are NOT looking for us at all, then the Saugeen Times is only competing with local area business and the heavily used Saugeen Shores web page.

The above three reasons are not really too important relative to the Internet, when we use the word Saugeen, though, because most of our now thousands of readers get to us NOT via Google, but by typing in

www.saugeentimes.com

The good thing is that as a domain name it is EASY to spell for locals.  They constantly see the word everywhere they go and over 'time' associate it with first of all the river, which appears everywhere and secondly with the community of Saugeen Shores and surrounding area. We'd like to be the third choice in the future.

Isn't Saugeen hard to spell relative to other words that could have been used?  Not really because it is re-enforced so many times in our memory.   Look what Google Earth does when you type in Saugeen. In fact Saugeen is spelled the way it is most probably as an European's ear translation to print of the Aboriginal word.

Google Earth has no trouble zeroing in to the Saugeen River basin.  It even lists Thorncrest Outfitters because they are a smart local company, who have gotten themselves up front and centre when people want to know about the Saugeen River using the amazing technology.  They don't have Saugeen in their name, but via Google ads, they can bring the focus of the user to them as you see in the yellow bubble above.  If they had to do it over again, they might think of substituting Saugeen for their own last name ... who knows?

Thorncrest is a good outfitter.  The name is sometimes spelled incorrectly as Thornecrest, but Google is smart enough to warn you that you might mean Thorncrest.  Google is so smart, arn't they? If you type into Google Saugeen Outfitters, you get their Paisley location because of the way Google works with the word Saugeen.  They appear #1 whereas if you type in Bruce Outfitters mean the generic Bruce County, they don't jump to the top at all. So Saugeen is a powerful word to use in Google because it is rare, whether it is attached to the name of the company or not.

Isn't it better to have a name that can be abbreviated in such a way that it becomes a kind of 'brand name'?  Yes, that's always a good thing, but the best thing to do is to NOT have two names, but just one.  XEROX is a great example. 

Xerox was founded in 1906 as "The Haloid Company. The company subsequently changed its name to "Haloid Xerox" in 1958 and then simply "Xerox" in 1961.

(next column)

The company came to prominence in 1959 with the introduction of the first plain paper copier using the process of xerography.  Xerox became a brand name as in 'Xerox It!'  Not many companies get to re-invent themselves in this way and as Regis McKenna, the guru of image Marketing says "Most companies only get one chance"  These are wise words from a man who 'imaged' Microsoft, Apple, Compaq, Genentech and many others.

The bad thing about abbreviations is they don't work as good Google names unless you buy up the domain names for the abbreviations, which costs money.  For example, General Motors has purchased www.gm.com and www.generalmotors.com and did it for their other brand names like Buick.

I know a marketing person who pays $250,000 per year to Google to make the three characters PLM appear on the first page of a Google Search! (Product Lifecycle Management)  So you can see these things have great cost and impact.  If the company had been named PLM in the first place, then they could have overcome this, but they were formed before the PLM revolution  and could not re-invent their name around a competitive industry and brand new industry.

Companies like BMW have www.bmw.com, but don't bother with www.beemer.com or www.beamer.com.   Somebody registered www.bavarianmotorworks.com, but who, is another question?  The real name would be Bayerische Motoren Werken and its derivatives get confusing for the non-German speaking buyers of the cars and motorcycles. Also, dot de is not used much in Canada or the USA
 

So nicknames have mixed blessings relative to names.  They are easily misspelled and other people pray on that by actually buying up the bad spellings or buying  dot com versions of dot ca. We registered both, but as yet don't use dot ca.

How about the word 'Times'?  Again Times has a long record here and globally.  It has a  long history of being connected to news so that's good relative to our local goals, but that's not the only reason. It does help to resonate the meaning.

We wanted to convey in the name something about Time because we are online 24/7, not monthly, weekly, daily, but moment to moment.

Also, we wanted something easy to spell and remember and secondly something not too long for not just the URL name www.saugeentimes.com, but also for email names like saugeentimes@hotmail.com, saugeentimes@yahoo.com and saugeentimes@gmail.com, all of which we took  You can have saugeentimes@aol.com, we don't like that company <smile>.  We have to put the name on a business card too and it has to fit nicely on column widths on our online local news service.

What the heck are we talking about?  Ok, that's a fair question.  We have gotten hundreds of press releases so far and will get thousands over the next few years.  We have a 350 pixel column width with 337 being the bordered width and long email names and long domain names sometimes cause trouble by leaving too much white space at the end of a line as you can see in the lines with green above.  This is not good visually and the names are very hard to remember, if they are too long.  We packed two on a single line to show you  Also when you make long domain names or email name into part of an ad either online or in print, they tend to fade out due to the resolution.  They don't scale well.

Have we convinced you that we actually thought about our name?  We hope so.

By the way, Google Earth gives us this nice picture of a waterspout off the Saugeen Shores last July, when we got the picture in the left hand column

Waterspout -- Photo by George Sled

^*By the way Reuters is a bad Internet name because people type Rueters, but Google will ask you... "Did you mean Reuters, but you get 404 not found for www.rueters.com.  They should buy that domain.  Incidentally, Spell Check detects Reuters as valid and Rueters as bad, but Saugeen is not in there yet, probably never will be, but that's ok.