Calling things by their right names

My job here is to write, and that means struggling with terminology. What do we call things? It’s important, in order to reduce confusion for StepRep users, that when we refer to things, we refer to them by the same name each time.

For instance, a couple weeks ago I wrote about how we’d been calling the various screens in StepRep “tabs” even though the tabs looked more like buttons. That probably confused a lot of people. So we fixed it.

Here’s another example. StepRep’s Reputation Monitor searches the internet for places where your name appears. When it finds a reference to you, you’ll see a link to it. You can then promote the link, so search engines will be more likely to sift it to the top in search results.

But what do we call these places where your name appears? We can’t call them “places where your name appears” because it’s unwieldy. So we’ve been calling them “stories”. But that’s a little misleading, because often your name will appear in a list, or a tweet, or a tag in a photo, rather than in a story. Also, depending on the context, we sometimes find it necessary to refer to these stories as “search results”. So we’re referring to the same thing by two different names.

Recently our CEO Brendan had the idea of replacing the word “stories” with “mentions”. This is more accurate than “stories”, but it sounds kind of dry and technical. And there are still contexts where it may be necessary to refer to these mentions as “search results”. So for now we’re still trying to figure out what to do. If you have any suggestions, send them along.

You and your business.

Still another example. Right from the beginning we’ve tried to find the right phrase to describe the audience for StepRep. For a while we called our users “service providers”, but a lot of people didn’t know what that meant. Lately around the office we’ve taken to calling them “SMBs”, which is short for “small and medium businesses”. But “small and medium businesses” is too wordy, and “SMBs” is meaningless to most readers.

Part of the challenge is that until recently, StepRep was designed exclusively for individuals, not businesses. When you signed up you created an account as you, not as your company. If ten people from your company signed up, they created ten different accounts, and there was no way to coordinate your promotional efforts.

Lately we’ve started to address this with the creation of Business Listings. This is in the very early stages, so don’t get too excited; we’re still figuring out how to make it work. But soon you and your nine co-workers will be able to link your accounts to a single profile for your company.

The main benefit will come through multiplying the reach of your Recommendation Network. StepRep is primarily about word-of-mouth advertising, and word-of-mouth is built on connections. New customers are much more likely to give your business a shot if they know someone who works there. Our Business Listings will make it much easier for those connections to surface.

I could go into a lot more detail, but I’ve already wandered off my original topic. One more thing. Soon we’re going to be introducing a new, super-easy way to show potential customers how they’re connected to you through the social networks they already use – Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. It’s gonna blow your mind.

…Assuming we figure out how to describe it properly.