The last post on identity got me thinking about branding online. Perhaps this experience will be useful to other webmasters and online entrepreneurs. It’s been useful and profitable for our business over the years. Ooo, a trade secret. No hands, ma!

One potential downside — perhaps the only one depending on your political persuasion — of the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld resigning and having a man who also has the last name of Gates poised to replace him is that anybody subscribing to “Gates” by keyword will now have to resort to shoehorning in ‘Bill’ to the query. Bill Gates is resigning in a couple years and plans to spend time giving away his vast fortunes to good causes through his foundation. Perhaps this politics-technology keyword confusion will be good for the Microsoft’s chief.

This is similar to shock jock Howard Stern being confused programatically by Anna Nicole Smith’s attorney and boyfriend Howard K. Stern. Don’t forget the ‘K’ part, Howard reminds on his Sirius talk radio show, clearly a little perturbed.

Check out Google News for “Gates” pictured above. Now see the query for “Bill Gates”/ Adjust your RSS feeds by keyword now, if you haven’t already.

Better to focus on one keyword when branding?
This raises a question about using full names for queries versus multiple names as part of an overall brand and identity? I’ve tried to limit this potential query quagmire by using one name. This is also why I try to refer to this website as Hmm, even though I don’t own hmm.com (wish I did) or MakeYouGoHmm instead of “make you go hmm.”

The answer to Apple’s pod obsession
On the last Webtalk Radio show we got into a discussion about the whole Apple wanting to own the ‘pod’ name dispute. My suggestion for those with podcasts to brand their podcast to their site name like we do here with Hmmcast. I suggested Rob and Dana called their show Webtalkcast or WebtalkRadiocast. ‘pod’ reminds me of Invasion of the Body Snatchers more than Apple and that’s a less than pleasant image.

How have the search engines treated Hmmcast?
Speaking of our currently bi-monthly podcast Hmmcast — expect #28 next Friday on schedule — I put some thought into the name of the podcast long before Apple started complaining. I made sure the domain for the name we would call it was available and registered Hmmcast.com (which leads to the Hmmcast page). Another important step in the road to making something easier to be found on the web.

Google: Hmmcast #1 result leads to Hmmcast category page which lists all Hmmcasts
Yahoo: Hmmcast #1 result leads to Feedburner RSS feed for the Hmmcast. That’s ok, I’ll still take that one.
Live: Hmmcast #1 result leads to Hmmcast #13 recap page here. Not sure why that page ranks so high over the category page, but the fact that it leads to a Hmmcast page is promising.
Ask: Hmmcast #1 result leads to the Hmmcast #15 recap page here.

A query for a unique word like Hmmcast should reach our category page or the Hmmcast RSS feed. Fortunately the major engines all led to something related.

Now you see why we didn’t call this Make You Go Hmm Podcast.

The shorter the better
When choosing a name or brand try to keep it short, memorable and whenever possible spelled correctly. Easy to remember Flickr, but how many people have tried to visit flicker.com which is not owned by Yahoo (and is one of those keyword laced domain landing pages)? Also double words like “for/4″ or “you/u” in a domain can be a type-in landmine as I’ve learned, so we bought the variation “u” domain and pointed to this site early on. I have trouble spelling sometimes and I know I’m not alone in this challenge, so make it easy — much easier than the domain abomination but conversely compelling service del.icio.us — for prospective and return visitors.

A few business things to hopefully make you think this morning, especially if you are starting a new project. What’s in a name? Everything, if you want to be found.

• Cringley’s NerdTV launches
• Scoble interviews Bill Gates
• ‘proprietary’ content blocked from live streaming video during PDC 2005 keynote
• The Road Ahead stops at Windows 3.1
• Gates dreams of $500 student tablet
• Blinkx thinks new podcast search is better than the big guys