Successful naming conventions for programs?

Since you can store programs in folders, you may want to also include that in your planning.  Below are a few of the folder names we use to organize our programs.

• Alerts
  • Admin
  • Sales
• Customer Success
• Data Management
• Inbound Marketing
  • SEM
  • Social Media
• Interesting Moments
• Marketing Metrics
• Nurturing
• Outbound Marketing
  • Ads
  • Content Syndication
  • Emails
  • Events
  • ...
• Revenue Model
• Sales Insight Emails
• Scoring
• Website Content
  • Case Studies
  • Contact Me
  • Datasheets
  • Presentations
  • ...

If you synch your programs with SFDC campaigns, Salesforce doesn't provide folders, just views.  Also program and campaign names in Marketo are by default sorted by name in the tree view, so you should consider this as well.  Below are a couple of conventions we follow in naming our programs.

• For short lived programs, we use the format "2013 Q1 - [short descriptive program name], so that we can easily find these based on their chronology. 
• For programs that are long lived (e.g. website content), we use the format "[category] - [short descriptive program name] (e.g. Whitepaper - xxxxx, Natural Search - xxx, Paid Search - xxx, etc.).

Elliott's system will work well. You can also take a look at other suggestions I've compiled here:
http://www.marketingrockstarguides.com/naming-and-organization-in-marketo-310/

I have used such naming conventions in the past, but sr. manager was thinking of using a name convention that was even more "formatted"

Thanks!

I like using the date and type:

Q1-2013-Webinar-Getting-Started
Q1-2013-Tradeshow-Mac-World
Q1-2013-Email-Newsletter-16Jan

This is the naming convention that has worked well for me:

EM 2013-07-15 (July Newsletter)
WR 2013-07-15 (Proudct A Webinar)
CS 2013-07-15 (Customer B Case Study)

The reason I recommend this naming convention is because these Programs will organize themseleves chronologically by type.