For those of you who think taking the time to name meeting spaces and video conferencing rooms is just for start-ups – THINK AGAIN. Many of today’s biggest brands take naming their meeting rooms very seriously. In fact, it’s a company-wide process that can help to encourage;
- regular collaboration
- the use of meeting spaces
- video conferencing adoption
- your company’s culture
- a stellar brand experience
Making a Case for Creative Conference Room Names
No matter the size of your business, naming your conference rooms in a relevant and clever manner can enhance personal associations with the company and even promote happiness among employees, especially if workers are able to submit suggestions and vote on their favorites. For instance, naming your boardroom something witty and irreverent encourages creativity and humor in your employees. If you’ll be using a space all the time, why not make it a source of smiles among your team?
To help, here are a few situations to consider if you’re not 100% certain you office needs to get more creative with their conference room names. You can also use the following to convince your team, or your boss.
It’s the Little Things
Whether someone is, caught up in the daily grind and needs a break from the monotony, you want to eliminate conference room confusion, you’re interviewing a job applicant, you’re entertaining investors the little things can make all the difference. Remember that day when you shuffled to the office coffee station and they started (or stopped) buying your favorite brand? WEW! Yeah, the littlest things can rock your world (in both a good and bad way).
Depending on how you feel about meetings, this could apply to conference rooms as well.
Open Office Spaces
The recent trend toward more open and collaborative office spaces means more opportunities to make a statement by naming your meeting spaces. This also means a shift away from individual offices and more meeting spaces, which are shared by many teams and sometimes even between companies.
Eliminating Confusion
Often open office spaces mean more confusion. For centuries we’ve named inanimate objects like ships, cars, and machines to improve communication. Why should meeting rooms be any different?
How can we keep them all those conference rooms straight? Names, of course! Having solid meeting room names can make conference room booking a little easier. After all, it’s easy to forget a room number, but not so easy to forget “The Batcave.”
Expressing Your Culture and Brand
Names are a reflection on your company’s culture and personality, according to HighFive. Your company’s name, email addresses, website copy, marketing materials and more all say something to the world about who we are as individuals and as an entity. It may seem like a small thing, but getting creative with the names of your shared spaces can improve the way you book meeting space, improve worker morale and participation, and reflect the humorous side of your company’s brand.
Although we’ll dive into many big brand examples, Facebook is one of my favorites. There is no other company where you get to say things like,”Allison is in Fighting Chuck Norris” on a regular basis.
It Can Become a Company Tradition (Like Facebook)
Not only is naming your conference rooms a really fun exercise but for some companies it can become “a thing.” In every Facebook office, employees vote on the name of the conference room in their designated area, first by picking themes, which get voted up or down, and then by voting on names within the theme. In fact, in an interview with Fortune, Slater Tow, a Facebook spokesperson said, “It’s a long-standing tradition here that we vote on conference room names.”
How to Name Your Conference Rooms
Recently, Vyopta opened a brand new office space. As a company in the video conferencing space, holding collaborative meetings are “a thing” around here. Here is the process we went through to help name each of our meeting spaces to help get everyone in the office involved, reduce meeting room confusion, and help welcome our partners (who travel far and wide) into the office.
1) Create Guardrails for Brainstorming
As you begin brainstorming, make sure your meeting space names have a unified theme, reflect your company’s identity and brand, and have a sense of humor or meaning to your colleagues.
There are many great examples of creative conference room names including Instagram who uses Game of Thrones names, BuzzFeed likes acronyms like OMG and WTF, and Atlassian references nerdcore movies and literature.
2) Pick a Theme
The coolest conference room names have one thing in common. They reflect a relevant theme. The dream is to be able to tie is back to your brand like Twitter, who names their conference rooms after birds. People want to feel like they’re a part of something bigger than themselves, a larger story. Having a relevant theme creates a fluid narrative that connects people to the company.
3) Make Sure It Scales
Something to consider is things like whether or not you have multiple floors or buildings. To help, you can consider picking one theme per floor or building. This creates a cohesive design and brand experience. There is nothing worse than running out of ideas, which is also why sourcing from your company’s employees can be super helpful.
4) Ask Your Employees
Of course, it’s easy to gravitate towards something you like, but what about the rest of your company? Getting buy-in from everyone makes sure all your employees feel represented and could help you avoid awkward situations. For instance, check out this article about DropBox’s “The Bromance Chamber.”
From there, it’s a great idea to come up with a few ideas and have your employees vote on which theme they like best. If you do not have more than one theme, simply skip ahead and ask your employees to brainstorm names around your theme. This can be done via a simple survey like SurveyMonkey or other top rated survey tools like those provided by PCMag.
If you’re wanting to keep the reigns on things, you can also provide your staff with a list of names for them to choose from. Wu-Tang Name Generator is a great option for this type of game plan. Also, feel free to check out other top rated name generators out there on the internet. This could include domain and blog name generators and business name generators.
Creative Meeting Room Name Ideas
There are loads of ways to generate ideas for meeting rooms. For instance, at a personal finance company, conference room names were represented by different types of currency (e.g., Euro, Pounds, Pesos, Yen, etc.) It could be that simple if you wanted for it to be.
However, as with many things, the internet is a great place to start generating ideas for your company’s room names. To help you cut through the hubbub out there, here are some of our favorite resources.
- 5 Companies With the Coolest Conference Room Names from Inc.com
- 34 Creative Conference Room Names from Roomzilla
- 100+ Conference Room Names to Spur Your Creativity from Davinci Meeting Rooms
From there, taking a look at what other companies have done is a great resource to spawn ideas, see what works, and what doesn’t work. Here are some of the best we’ve found.
Ok, Facebook has been mentioned a few times so we have to tip our hats to them. Facebook is a company with more than, 10,000 employees and report earnings in the $10 billion range. If your enterprise company doesn’t take those numbers seriously, we don’t know what to say.
We also really like this example since they have several themes going. Here are just a handful of the most creative conference room name examples.
#1 Theme: Horrible Life Ideas
- Running with Scissors
- Fighting Chuck Norris (we loved it so much we mentioned it twice)
- Knife at a Gun Fight
- Crossing the Streams
#2 Theme: Musicians + Acronyms
- Barenaked LEDs
- Collective SOL
- Flock of SQLs
- Notorious OMG
- Vanilla ICMP
- LOL Cat Stevens
- 50 CentOS
- Black Eyed PC Load Letter
- Jay-ZOMG
- LL Cool.js
- TLDR.E.M.
- IMHOgen Heap
- Johnny Cache
#3 Theme: Star Wars Crossed with Drinks (Personal Favorite)
- Dark and Stormtrooper
- Use the Four Loko
- Mai Tai Fighter
- Brewbacca
- Jar Jar Drinks
- Darth Jager
Etsy
Etsy is a retail company headquartered in Brooklyn, NY. The company has around 1,000 employees and reports bringing in around $25 million per year according to Glassdoor. This company was able to get really creative with their video-enabled meeting rooms by working with food/musician mashups. Here are some of Etsy’s best;
- Ace of Bouillabaisse
- Bon Bon Jovi
- David Lee Broth
- Fleetwood Mac ‘n’ Cheese
- Froyo Ma
- Johnny Cashews
- Lil Kimchee
- Nine Inch Snails
- Oreo Speedwagon
- Pjork
- Public Edamame
- Red Velvet Underground
- Soy Division
- Sushi and the Banshees
- The Rolling Scones
- Wu Tang Clams
Groupon
Groupon is yet another company with over 10,000 employees who isn’t afraid to have a little fun. This company reports over $5 billion per year and still has some of the kookiest conference room names we could find out there. Here are just a few of the clever ones;
- Boom Boom Room
- Coupon D’Etat
- Crocodile Done Deal
- Deal Pig
- Elvis is Alive in Here
- Hipster Free
- I was told there would be pizza
- It was canceled
- Man Bear Pig
- NO CEO
- No Dead Bodies In Here
- Meet Locker
- The Larger Room
- Organic Cageless GMO-free Conference Room
Vyopta
At Vyopta, we wanted to lean into the fact that we are located in Austin, TX. Austin is known to be a great tourist spot, and we love hosting partners and other 3rd party visitors in our office. To help spawn conversations, we decided to name our video conference rooms after popular tourist spots or historical landmarks. This really helps jump-start conversations and help visitors feel at home.
- Barton Springs
- Deep Eddy
- Lady Bird Lake
- Hamilton Pool
- Kerbey Lane
- Salt Lick
- Franklin’s BBQ
- Elephant Room
- Broken Spoke
- ACL (Austin City Limits)
- Continental Club
- Zilker Park
- State Capital
- Mount Bonnell
- Lake Travis
- Greenbelt
- The Driskill
- The Oasis
- Bullock Museum
- LBJ Library
The best part was, our IT staff spent time making custom TV screen savers for each room. Not only do they look amazing, but it was a simple and inexpensive way to “dress up” each room and help make them more recognizable.
