1. Get advice. Talk to other local companies
   that have been through a naming exercise. I spoke to the folks at Avvo
   and Global Scholar to understand what’s involved. Usually anyone who’s
   done it before will tell you it’s a frustrating experience. Be prepared
   for some ups and downs and don’t give up when it gets hard!
2. Understand your objective criteria.
   Everyone has an opinion and it’s almost impossible to get a unanimous
   vote on a name. Put together your objective criteria to test names
   against. Here’s the criteria we used (based on advice from others):
   1. Available (at a reasonable cost)
   2. Memorable (it needs to be easy to remember the name, what we stand for and the URL)
   3. Ownable (we can trademark it in the US and potentially globally)
   4. Fits our what our company stands for (i.e. our brand attributes):
      1. Simple / easy to use / accessible
      2. Innovative
      3. Fluid dynamic
      4. Trustworthy
      5. Likeable
   5. Differentiated (from our competition)
   6. Searchable (obvious spelling and easy to find using Google)
   7. Phone test (can you image saying this name to someone at a party or answering the phone with the name?)
3. Be creative.
   Brainstorm as many names as possible and ask creative people you know
   to get involved. You can try online generators
   (http://www.lightsphere.com/dev/web20.html), but the best names usually
   come from the imagination and creativity, not from generators. If
   you’re not super creative and don’t have creative colleagues, try
   hiring some creative types to help you out.
4. Get a good domain broker.
   We used sedo to help us find out if domain names were available -
   almost all are taken and it can take days for domain owners to respond.
   Expect to pay anywhere from $5K to $25K to a reasonable name. We were
   lucky and we picked our name up for $1100 from an auction on namejet.com
5. Do extensive customer testing.
   You’d be amazed how people have different perceptions and mental
   schemas about names. We ruled our several names because of strongly
   negative perceptions we’d never have discovered without testing.
6. Don’t forget a trademark search.
   Finally, don’t forget to run a trademark search on your name. You can
   get a lawyer to do it for $1500 or less, or do it yourself at
   http://www.uspto.gov/

If you are about to embark on a renaming exercise, good luck! Hopefully this will point you in the right direction

-Ian