I really have to share this story, and you need to hear it. How do I know? Because you don’t want to make this same mistake that I witnessed. We all fear making marketing mistakes, and rookie entrepreneur errors. Read on to find out what NOT to do.

What happened? I got an email not too long ago, and it turned me completely off to this person’t product. I knew as soon as I got the email I knew that this was a person who did not do his research. In some cases, with some businesses, it might not be that big of a deal, but this product was a huge investment into an analytics software. And, well, analytics and metrics do require research to know that they are the right things to track, right?

So anyway, I get this email and it’s called the - wait for it - PAP method. As a woman, that makes me think of one and only one thing, a not so comfortable thing. Clearly this guy who created it does not have a strong female influence in his life. :)

The moral of the story is, make sure you’re not using acronyms that have already been used for MEANINGFUL medical procedures, or things what leave a distaste in your mouth.

There’s a couple of things you can do when you create a new methodology for your program, to make sure you don’t make this same mistake for yourself. First, just do a quick Google search just to see what comes up. Do you have to be completely unique? No. You don’t have to be the exclusive user of a particular acronym, but you do want to see if there’s a big deal name using the same acronym or if there’s a particular medical procedure associated with it.

It takes a few seconds, and you’ll save yourself a headache later.

If you want to take your game up to another level, you can do a search on the trademark website, and make sure you’re not infringing on anyone’s intellectual property. Totally necessary? That’s up to you and your own feelings.

Has this embarrassing thing happened to me? Luckily no, but I am pretty careful before I put something into the marketplace. I don’t like to get flamed either.

Don’t be the butt of another brand’s jokes. ;)

Have you encountered weird acronyms in doing business? Share them with me!

What the...Acronym?