Organizations have a personality, and it bleeds into everything from executive reporting to product offerings. A recent Fortune article entitled Microsoft without Gates offers this wonderful tidbit about Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft:

Even though he never was a serious computer programmer, by all accounts Ballmer is just as good at math as Gates is. He lives and breathes data. “Steve has a computer in his head,” says Bob Muglia, a 20-year company man who heads the Server and Tools division. Ballmer expects his subordinates to be adept in math as well. He distributes 11-by-17 sheets filled with numbers detailing the progress of various operations. The numerals are so small that executives use transparent magnifier rulers to see them. But there are never any columns showing percentage changes. Ballmer believes people ought to do that in their heads. It saves space on the paper for more numbers.

Wow. If it is as bad as the author describes, Ballmer has designed the anti-dashboard.

The Presentation Zen blog offers another great example of organization culture as displayed in business artifacts:

Gates here explaining the Live strategy. A lot of images and a lot of text...Good graphic design guides the viewer and has a clear hierarchy or order so that she knows where to look first, second, and so on. What is the communication priority of this visual? It must be the circle of clip art, but that does not help me much.

Does it get more "Zen" than this? "Visual-Zen Master," Steve Jobs, allows the screen to fade completely empty at appropriate, short moments while he tells his story.

Straight from the parallel universe where clever and horrible go together like peanut butter and chocolate comes the following press release:

We are excited to announce the launch of our new community website for Sears and Kmart customers. The service you originally registered with, My SHC Community is now called sk-YOU. The new name represents "Sears and Kmart, building a better relationship with you" and that is of course, part of our vision and mission. It is a growing and personalized online community currently comprised of 40,000 consumers who want to be heard. You can share ideas, opinions and thoughts on a wide variety of topics from travel to kitchen appliances and cell phone service. It enables you to provide feedback and guidance on the offers and shopping experiences that are most important to you.

I can see how this sounded wildly clever in a meeting.

Mash Sears, Kmart, and "you" all together and look what you get. It shows our commitment to the customer and it sounds like "sku".

Bzzzt, horrible. People don't care about stock keeping units—and they certainly don't want to be associated with one. They don't care about clever. Unless you're a financier, there's no reason to associate Sears with Kmart. Branding should help the you understand and remember a product. It's not about how you perceive the customer or about how you perceive an internal initiative. The dash and all caps YOU makes it harder for the customer to remember. But I ramble.

At Juice, our naming bible is available in PDF form from Igor International.

http://www.igorinternational.com/process/naming-guide-product-company-names.php

The central wisdom of this guide—and it's packed full of gems, naming taxonomies by industry, checklists, taglines, case studies—is that names fall into the following categories.

Descriptive names (names that describe what the product or company does) BMW, IBM, AdWords

• Good for a product, easy to remember
• Rough sledding for a company name, as there will be dozens of companies in the field with similar names (unless you have 100 years of meticulous branding like BMW and IBM)

Invented names with latin roots

• Aquilent, Taligent, Acela, Agilent
• "Safe" choices, hard to remember, a blank slate. Generally too clever by half. Hey, did you think it was clever to name a company as a cross between "agile" and "intelligent"? Nobody cares!

Invented names that are fun to say

• Snapple, Oreo, Kodak
• Fun to say, opens the door for lots of positive associations with strong branding

Experiential names (names that describe the experience of the company or product)

• Navigator, Safari, TrailBlazer, Fidelity
• Intuitive but common, doesn't differentiate, a workmanlike approach for a product

Evocative names (names that evoke feelings about the experience you will have with the company—those feelings may even be initially negative)

• Caterpillar, Apple, Amazon, AirPort, Target, Yahoo, Virgin
• Connects emotionally with people because they have lots of previous experience with the word. "Scary" choices that are hard to get a committee to agree to

We often are are asked why we're named "Juice"—Igor is the answer. When we go places, people say "Heeey, Juice guys!"—if you're a client, be aware you're not the first one to use that line. We benefit from every dollar Nantucket Nectars spends on their "Juice Guys" ads and we love it. Every dollar Tropicana spends helps you remember our name. Even OJ Simpson is on our branding team.

If you're naming an internal product, steer toward descriptive names or evocative names. If you're creating a reporting portal, don't be afraid to call it "Report Portal". Or call it "Butterfly" or "Moonbeam." Brighten people's lives by delivering fun, or ease their lives by not making them remember some obscure acronym. Most of all, remember to be a servant of your customers and that clever is not equal to smart.

A couple months ago, we put together a Greasemonkey tool that sucked data out of Google Analytics, and after mining it for trend information, integrated it back into the GA interface. This week's tool combines and extends Google Analytics with data from an outside source.

Here is a quick alpha of our Greasemonkey integration of external data reporting into Google Analytics for Kampyle, a "feedback analytics service." Click on the images to zoom in.

Clicking on the 'Kampylize' tab queries the Kampyle site in real-time to populate the standard GA data table.

Our friends at Kampyle run a service that allows website owners to put a feedback button on individual pages of their website. All information submitted by the user is uploaded to a central Kampyle database that compiles the user feedback with web page url and standard internet statistics such as the name of the browser. Website owners can access a server-end service that consists of a reporting site complete with summary data tables, graphs, and charts.

Since both sites are web-based reporting suites segmented in a similar fashion (individual website, date, web browser, etc.), they integrate together naturally. There is a lot of value in placing related data side by side, allowing users to get a more holistic picture of web site performance. If you have other ideas of data sources that would fit neatly with Google Analytics, let us know and we'll consider building the integration.

If you're interested in technical details, continue to Open Juice to see how this is all accomplished...