New Women's Site Picks a Name to Dye For

Getting backing to launch a women's-interest website is easy. Picking a halfway decent name? That's the hard part.

Half the menopausal matrons of media put their heads together and the best they could come up with was Wowowow.com. Yahoo fared somewhat better, but was still forced to settle for the forgettable Shine.

And now comes BettyConfidential.com, whose founders didn't realize they were picking a term with R-rated connotations.

That would be Betty, as in the line of dye whose slogan is "color for the hair down there." (The word refers to the "down there" itself as well as the product, according to creator Nancy Jarecki.)

BettyConfidential founder Deborah Perry Piscione says she'd never heard Betty used in that way before this week, when her content-and-networking site announced its birth.

"All the great names are taken, so it's real challenging," she says. "Any direction you go with any website name, you can figure out something derogatory."

The decision to go with "Betty" emerged from focus groups. "The women said, Look, we need a best friend. We want a website with the name of a woman, and we want that woman to have a non-threatening name. 'Betty' was the one name everyone came back to that was this sort of a maternal, best friend figure."

Piscione, a writer and former government official, lined up some fairly big names for her advisory board, including CNN's Soledad O'Brien and former Ladies' Home Journal editor in chief Myrna Blyth. She's hoping to boost its profile with a major partnership -- with Yahoo's Shine, which will launch later this month. "We've been in conversations with them since last summer," she says.

But she rules out joining forces with the dye company: "Maybe they'll want to advertise."