Of course what I am going to talk today is not web2.0 (I hate even writing the word), but choosing a domain name for your future successful brand. For better or for worse, we all know this is very important and at times defines the entire business models. But as the recent Google fiasco proved, a name not marketed for China just won’t have a fly here!

So how to go about it - after all most of us are not linguists, and certainly not in Chinese. Well there are just a few key points one should understand that will help overcome this first step. First of all, although people here are accustomed to using English letters, the English words in general bring no associations whatsoever. In other words, if you are building a site in China, you better make it sound like China! But then how to go about it? After all, not only is Chinese Internet overlaid on top of “dot-com” namespace, but it is also of equal size (every U.S. social networking site = 20 copies in China). The answer is simple: use the numbers! Yes that’s right, although original purpose of domains was to ignore the numbers alltogether - China decided to do things its own way (as usual) and kept the number world all to itself. As such some of the most famous Chinese domain brands contain numbers (21cn.com, 51job.com). But be careful, just like with everything else, people here are extremely superstitious about numbers – so don’t even think about using “3” or “4” anytime soon.

Now that we got numbers out of the way, what about that “dot-com”, “dot-net” mess? This is still an interesting question as there is currently even a bigger mess about this in China. Basically the most common options are “.com”, “.com.cn”, “.cn.com”, “.net.cn” (in the order of occurrence) – don’t be surprised, however, if people will be searching for your domain on Baidu as this mess is not about to go anywhere anytime soon.

Finally, there are many English words (IT for example) that are commonly becoming more accepted – so do your research and don’t translate everything word-for-word.

To conclude, the formula: keep it short + add some numbers + choose Chinese words wisely. Or scratch that and just find some widget that does it for you..

At an end of a post I just want to mention this one case. There is a site meijob (“beautiful job”) – sounds great, looks (well) almost as great. In any case, you ask any foreigner and he will tell you it has a good meaning (mei also translates as “no job”) – i.e. you use it when you don’t have a job. Now don’t ask me why, but most Chinese are resentful to this because in their minds this means they won’t find a job. So, words are words but understanding people matters!

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