Rebranding and common misspellings can often lead to confusion.
Two words that are often misspelled are contained in the new name for the Port Covington urban development project in Baltimore, Maryland on the south shore of the South Baltimore peninsula. That name, of course, as the title of this article indicates, is Baltimore Peninsula.
Port Covington is the geographic area of Baltimore’s strip of land along the Middle Branch of the Patapsco River on the southern edge of the South Baltimore peninsula. Over a century ago it was developed as a port for the shipment and export of coal. It is (today) the site of one of the largest urban development projects on the East Coast.
In today’s business world, rebranding is becoming increasingly popular. However, with rebranding comes the risk of misspellings. While careful proofing eliminates errors in marketing materials many people (marketing agencies) fail to consider typos by the general public – especially when typing Internet domain names into the URL bar of a web browser.
So, what about the misspellings of Baltimore Peninsula?
Common typos for “Baltimore” are balitmore (59%), balitimore (7%) and baltimroe (5%).
Common typos for “peninsula” are penninsula (54%), pennisula (19%) and penisula (18%).
Note: the percentages shown are from the How to Spell website and were collected from over 15,231,521 spell check sessions on www.spellchecker.net from Jan 2010 – Jun 2012.
There are people (and companies) who capitalize on misspellings when it comes to recovering website traffic. They are commonly referred to as “domain squatters” and actually do monetize erroneous web traffic. Yes, people really do type in web addresses and often type them incorrectly. Of the above examples (as of this writing, November 2022), baltimroe.com is still available – the others have all been registered by someone or some entity. A couple are being offered on the third-party market and one has expired and may soon be deleted from the registry (perhaps for someone else to grab). This writer will be surprised if “baltimroe.com” is not soon registered.
From those typo percentage it might be interesting to see how long the domain “BalitmorePenninsula.com” and its variations remain available. (Yes, that is meant as a hint to the marketing agency responsible for the BaltimorePeninsula.com website. 🙂
