My system is to start a shortcut with a letter indicating what kind of text string follows. Primarily that’s “t” for twitter handle, “c” for company name. That’s followed by a q, then followed by the first few letters of the shortcut.
Thus, tqli results in @light_reading. cqmi results in “Microsoft Corp.,” and so on. I have dozens and dozens of those. When I run into a conflict when creating a new one, I edit the old one to add more letters until it becomes unique. Thus, if I encounter another company with a name starting in “mi” — say, “Minisoft” — then the Microsoft shortcut would become cqmic and Minisoft becomes cqmin.
(Is there even a company called “Minisoft”? Whatever.)
In practice, when it’s time to mention a company name for the first time in an article, I type cq and then start typing the company name until the full, proper name appears. And having to append a space at the end of the shortcut screws up that system.
And I oversimplified above. Actually what happens when I type a company shortcut is that I get a shortcode which, when entered into my company’s publishing system, produces the company’s full, formal name, with a link to the website and — in the case of publicly traded companies — its stock ticker symbol.