Naming our communities: while there are not any rules, generally we shouldn’t be naming our communities after their corporate sponsors. For some product/support communities, it makes sense but if you want to rally around a bigger idea or value prop, the name should reflect that.
The name of your community should resonate with your reason for gathering.
Would you rather be part of the “Dyson Vacuum Forum” or “Suckers for Interesting Design”
credit: https://designwanted.com/james-dyson-inventor-industrial-designer/
Bad example, sure. But it just feels inauthentic when we name a community after a brand. Like how stadiums are named after their corporate sponsors now.
I’ll share a real life example from my work. We have a small community of developers we call the “Mozilla AI” community. It doesn’t communicate the value prop to members clearly enough.
The reason why you join the Mozilla AI community is because you are a technologist that wants to be part of a movement to shape the future of AI. You want to build solutions, get support for your project, plug into the wider ecosystem of open source developers and get access to specific knowledge/maintainer support.
Although Mozilla has a strong reputation of doing important policy and standards work and making the internet healthier for everyone, not everyone is familiar with the Mozilla mission. Rather than forcing it on people, let them discover the brands values through the work itself and the relationships forged. Through the support of the organization maintaining the space, they get to know the brand and over time and trust in it more. Having a neutral, more purpose-centric name gives us more freedom to let the community grow organically and give members ownership over it. This is also a good reason to not tie the name so closely to the brand. The name of the community isn’t where the brand derives value, it’s the relationships and connections the brand.
I suppose there may be an SEO counter-argument but your brand name will likely come up organically through your support of the community.
Transparency and Your Community
There are also cases where the brand is intentionally obfuscated, I personally don’t like this.
Ideally to me as a member, it should be abundantly transparent when a community is sponsored/architected by an organization, especially a for-profit. The sad reality is, its not. There are countless forums that look like organic online community on the surface that are actually carefully orchestrated by corporate interest when you look deeply at who is running it.
It’s also the case that a lot of times brands you think may be involved with an online community are in fact NOT in control. Recently Mr Beast, an uber-popular youtuber, made a critical statement of US healthcare that was moderated by r/youtube.
For those asking – r/youtube is a fan run subreddit, it’s not owned by or affiliated with YouTube in any way.
TeamYouTube
January 12, 2025
Youtube’s claim of having no affiliation with the subreddit is entirely plausible. It’s not uncommon for brands to have no control over the communities that form around them.
The only way to address this transparency issue is for members to be aware of and trust the individuals moderating content and managing the community.
Conclusion
While I think naming your community after your brand can be a bad idea, there is no hard and fast rule I have to offer. Hopefully this post offered a few insights and helped inspire you to think on it a bit more on these issues.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on naming communities. Find me in your preferred channel by clicking on the links in the footer.
Fun quiz time? Check out my Digital Marketing Quiz (https://mattcool.tech/tags/badges) for some examples of terminology around practices like ‘astroturfing’ we see in online communities.