Reading Ad Week’s “40 Strangest Agency Names” story reminded me that I wanted to share how I came up with MY name, Giant Peach.

Wexley School for Girls co-founder Ian Cohen had this to say to Ad Week :

“Come up with something you truly love living with. I love this name. That’s the thing about creating something that doesn’t have a real meaning behind it. We keep exploring it and building our brand.”

And I agree. Giant Peach works for me. For 8 years now, I’ve never gotten tired of it. I love it for a couple reasons. The first is, it’s a happy name. Just say it, and try and stay cross. You can’t, can you? It’s playful, soft, slightly feminine and a little quirky. Everything that I wanted to convey about my brand. Best of all, anytime I give someone my e-mail address, I get the same question: “What do you do?” For a slightly introverted freelancer, that’s the perfect opening. From there, sharing my work is easy! It’s a built in marketing tool.

But honestly, those things happened by accident.

In 2003 I left the studio I started with my business partner Sean Thomas. Sean and I go way back, and Synergy Studio was doing great. But discovered that I didn’t want to work for ANYONE, even my self. Freelancing was what was most comfortable for me. Like any designer, my first thought was “I need a URL” and that started my search for a name. With a name like Katrina (the hurricane) Miller (the beer) I knew I wanted something that wouldn’t be to hard to build search terms for. I’ve always loved the Seattle shop “Modern Dog” and I knew I wanted a name “like that”. This meant I wanted two words, an adjective and a noun. It may not show (or maybe it does!) but I’m NOT a writer. All the names I came up with were awful.

I gave up and registered “katrinamillerdesign.com” **barf***

On my way home one day, I heard a story on NPR about Kelowna BC and “The Peach”. The Peach is a concession stand shaped and painted to resemble a “Giant Peach“. While this is not that interesting in it’s self, what caught my ear was that the Peach that is there now is not the original. The original Peach was thrown into the lake during the peach festival riot in 1990. Are you scratching your head about that? Yah. Me too. And then I thought “Giant Peach”. And hey! It’s an adjective and a noun! It’s also a COLOR! BONUS!

As soon as I walked in the door I went to the computer to register my domain…which was taken. I loved the name so much however, I couldn’t give it up, and registered the NEXT BEST thing…ReallyBigPeach.com.

A lot of people ask if the name “Giant Peach” is in any way a reference to the Roald Dahl book “James and the Giant Peach“. It isn’t. Though that is a VERY GOOD book. And you should totally read it anyway.

When sharing some analytics data with a client I got a question on what “bounce rate” means. This is the explanation I shared with her, and though it might be useful for some of you.

A “bounce” is when a visitor lands on a page of your site, and then leaves the site without clicking on anything else.

Usually you want your customers to hang around and move deeper into your site (stickyness). HOWEVER, sometimes your bounce rate can be artificially high if:

• Your page answers all their questions and they don’t NEED to go further. If you have a good amount of time spent on a page, a high bounce rate is probably ok.
• If you have lots of off site links. For example: links to Facebook, YouTube, sister companies, blogs, etc. Sometimes you WANT your users to go see your content on another site (videos on YouTube, are a good example). In this case a high bounce rate doesn’t necessarily mean anything. They could be “bouncing” or going to your content elsewhere, and you can’t really know. If you think this could be a problem there are some tricky things you can do with code so that offsite links to your content won’t read as “bounces”.

For more information see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounce_rate

Conversion Marketing with Ian Lurie “Lessons in Twitter community building, by Kevin Hillstrom”

Great article. And the book it’s a review of, HIllstrom’s Hashtag Analytics, sounds like a good read (I’m going to pick it up eventually).

But here is the thing. The author of the review shares some exciting data from the book.

Even answering someone’s tweet makes them more likely to participate. Folks who get their tweets answered will engage—participate again—41% of the time.

That compares to about 6% of the time if someone tweets once or twice, retweets and then is gone.

So, even if they don’t retweet you, respond to folks if you want them to stick around.

I see this time and time again. And it is exciting. But what strikes me is how…we already know it. I think most social media boils down do a couple things we all know:

• People like people who are nice. If you share, and are generous, people will like you.
• People like people that listen to them. If you listen to people, and show you are listening, people will respond favorably.
• People like to be appreciated. When someone does something nice for you, thank them. When someone teaches you something new, thank them, and share that knowledge. When someone does something you admire, complement them.

These are all things we know. We learned them on the playground, in our homes, classes, and workplaces. I think the real lesson to learn is not to that “People like people who are nice.” But that customers, consumers, clients….are people. And guess what? Companies (through social media) are people too.