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Genius vs. Obvious

It used to be that the biggest challenge in the online universe was simply building a website. Tools have emerged to make that hurdle inconsequential to most. Having a website is like having a phone number. It’s just a necessity with a relatively low-pain threshold for entry. At least relative to 1999.

Today the headache in modern communications seems to simply be finding a name that isn’t already taken. We can no longer simply own the name of the company, organization or even philosophy around which we build our online presence. I know I’m not alone in the universe in having spent countless hours brainstorming in front a white board to try to come up with a website name.

Such was the case with the Ocean Companies, which includes Ocean Gold Seafoods, Ocean Protein, Ocean Cold and Ocean Express. Four companies executing four distinct areas of the fishing business. Processing, fishmeal production, cold storage and transportation. The dilemma began when we decided we wanted to put each company under a single umbrella to streamline our communications. It seemed simple enough that we would be called the “Ocean Companies.”

Ocean, however, seems to be an extremely popular word in the online universe. And not just for those in the fishing industry. There’s www.ocean.com (environmental education); www.ocean.org (a religious site); and www.ocean.edu (a county college in New Jersey).

And www.oceancompanies.com? They sell technology hardware.

Ummm…okay.

I suppose it makes sense, in a way. The ocean does take up the majority of our planet’s surface area. I believe it was Carl Sagan who noted the absurdity of the fact that we even call our planet “Earth” given the relative amount of space of land v. water.

So as we sat around our whiteboard, throwing out site name after site name, we were forced to think a little harder about what we were trying to achieve with our website. Why were we uniting anyway? What was our unifying purpose? How do we want people to think about us?

Which ultimately led us to abandon the ocean all together.

We realized that our unifying purpose, while reliant upon the ocean, was not in fact the ocean itself. It was the people and community of our region. Ultimately, our call to unify was to “Keep Grays Harbor Fishing.”

Fishing is a huge part of the already largely resource-based economy of Grays Harbor county. Generations of families here have been involved with the fishing industry in one form or another. It is more common than not to find families where the father is gone for several months of the year on a boat. Whether it’s commercial, charter or recreational, fishing is critical to the future of our region and the future of our business.

In light of that, we launched www.keepgraysharborfishing.com.

And we are using that site to not only communicate information about the four businesses that make up the Ocean Companies, but to hammer home our passion for three areas of focus that we believe ultimately will achieve our goal to keep Grays Harbor fishing. Namely, Good Jobs. Clean Oceans. Strong Communities.

If the decisions we make achieve one or more of those goals, they are good business decisions. And they make sense for how we should be communicating our business and our mission to our community, our industry, and other stakeholders in the fishery.

This whole URL naming process got me thinking about how communications needs to convey more than simply “what” anymore. It’s just as critical to communicate “why” and if possible, “how.” And somehow find a way to do that in an instant.

We think we’ve done that with Keep Grays Harbor Fishing.

I don’t think even five years ago people would even consider launching a company website that didn’t have the company name somewhere in the URL. We even started inventing all kinds of new endings (.com, .net, .edu., .tv, etc.) to compensate for the crowded online universe of names. One need only Google “Ocean” to see how that’s worked out.

At the time that the site name came to us it seemed genius. Two months later it just seems obvious.

I don’t know if that’s more a testament to human ingenuity or our collective short attention spans. Perhaps a bit of both. Regardless, invention seems to be on hyper-speed in the online communications world. Buckle up.