Too many communities don’t have a name.
They’re simply ‘community’ (or, worse, “discussions/topics”). It’s like calling your business ‘business’.
Typically these ‘default names’ reflect a lack of strategy. You’re not sure what else to call this thing you’re creating, so why not ‘community’?
It’s not a major problem if you’re building a community on behalf of a brand with whom your audience already shares a strong sense of identity. But the Supreme’s and Harley Davidson’s of this world are few and far between.
It is a bigger problem if, like the majority of us, you’re working for a brand which doesn’t immediately inspire a cult following. The community name is a terrific opportunity to make a clear positioning statement. It’s a chance to indicate who the community is for, what the community is about, and why members should join.
But if you have a strategy you should know what inspires your members, what challenges they overcome, and the kind of identity they hold, it becomes easier to select a name for the community to match.
A name should be entirely unique to you, it should be a symbol that represents a place where members want to go to, and ideally, it should not clash with other obvious connections.
You can’t change the name of the company, but you probably do want to be deliberate over the name of the community.
