NameThis Test Drive
$99 for 370 name suggestions… sounded good to me. Recently I tested out Klusters new NameThis crowdsourcing system. NameThis allows people and company’s to use the wisdom of the crowds to come up with names and slogans for their companies. Other companies have used the wisdom to of the crowds to design logos, websites, advertising materials but this is the first one I have seen that targets just a small area of marketing. (very long tail of them) The major advantage with NameThis is the price, for $99 you can post a project to help come up with a name. But right now there are a huge amount of BAD names, Kluster is working hard on fixing this, just the other day the announced that they would put a limit on the number of names you can suggest in a hour, and a feature that excluded words from names.
I wanted to test NameThis.com out so I made a project to come up with a name for a consumer show for men. I gave a description and a list of things that would be at the show and what names I was not looking for. So the 48 hours process started and I watched, and I noticed that I was getting a lot of Man or Guy names. These were fine but I wanted to try to get people to expand beyond that, so I went looking for a edit description feature and found non, so I had to email the team and they added “Although names with “Man,” “Men,” and “Guy” are good, try to come up with names that do not use those words”. I sorted though the list and invested in names I like, so I could have them at the top of my list. At the end of the round 3 names were selected as the winner. None of which I liked at all. I then lost my list of names I had invested in and had to search for them to sort out which names I liked. My top three names were:
* It’s a Guy Thing
* The Stag Show
* Live, Work, Play : The Modern Man
NameThis.com uses a predictive market platform, which allows users to invest in names to pick a winner. Then the winners are paid out based on which names had the most invested (I assume). As a project owner I was hoping to get access to that information. I would have liked to know who invested (demographic) in which name, how many people invested in which names (%), and I would have liked my votes to have a little bit more power (not all the power) but a little more weight than the average person. After all this is my name and I have to live with it, so I should be able to help pick who gets paid. Information is power so I hope that Kluster opens up the data to project owners soon.
What I love about Kluster so far is that they listened to their community unlike some other crowdsourcing communities. They relies that their community is driving their business and that if they are going to invest in the wisdom of the crowds then they should listen to their crowd. In a series of blog post Kluster has asked its community what it should do to make its product better, and in a matter of weeks they have take those suggestions and put them into practice.
A great man once said, “Why do we fall, sir? So that we might better learn to pick ourselves up.”
Kluster has taken this to heart, they are not afraid to fall because each time you fall you learn and become stronger.
Keep up the good work and keep on listening.