Twitter’s Symbol-Only Branding Strategy

Spot the odd one out.

With its new symbol-only brand identity system Twitter has chosen to pursue a fundamentally different branding strategy than its peers and competitors.

Twitter refreshed and restructured their brand identity system last week. Their announcement post played up some of the detailed design decisions about the geometric construction of their more aerodynamic (and IPO-friendly?) bird symbol. That design narrative is less interesting to me than the strategy behind the change and what affordances it now facilitates for the company. The key decision worth considering is their move to a symbol-only identity strategy.

I think this is a very ballsy move to depreciate their logotype and now have their bird symbol function as their sole corporate signifier.

This symbol-only strategy makes sense for global brands, as it allows their visual identities to sit above the constraints of languages. They can be multilingual in their local written communications, but their brand identity uses a shared symbolic language. This branding strategy may also be taken as a statement of intent; positioning Twitter within the most elevated strata of brands.

Starbucks did this in 2011 when they streamlined the visualisation of their siren symbol and upgraded its status to that of sole corporate signifier. Apple and Nike were two of the global brands to realise the power of this approach earlier. It is fascinating that Twitter has taken this step after only six years, whereas those other iconic brands needed decades to achieve a symbol-only system.

One key difference between the way the Twitter brand operates in comparison with Apple, Nike and Starbucks is that it is most often used by third parties rather than under direct corporate control. You are as likely to encounter it within the context of someone else’s web page or app as you are on Twitter.com. It is dispersed across the Internets. There are endless user-generated customised Twitter icons in use.

In addition to being the symbol of the corporate entity, the bird icon sometimes serves double-duty as a proxy for the verb “to tweet”. It also is intended to indicate the phrase ‘Follow me on Twitter’ when used in conjunction with an @username within a badge device.

Interestingly, the other top-tier social media companies, Facebook, Google and LinkedIn, all lack a comparable symbolic component to their visual brand identities. They either use their full names or else tend to co-opt the app-inspired ‘initial-letter-in-a-box’ visual convention. The increasingly generic nature of that visual convention could be one of the reasons why Twitter have depreciated its use themselves.

Operationally, having the minimum number of brand mark variants in use will simplify brand management and compliance, and ultimately should reinforce user recognition.

Facebook have adopted a different branding strategy with very different affordances and benefits. That will be the subject of a follow-up post.

Update: this post is based on an answer I wrote to a Quora question. Forbes picked up on my Quora version which they republished on their blog with my permission.

1. Some (not-really) rejected alternate titles for this post might have included: ‘New Twitter brand identity takes flight’, ‘Twitter brand spreads it wings’ and, ahem, ‘Ornithology Trumps Typography’.
2. The depreciated Twitter bubble logotype was always inelegant and amateur-looking to my eye, so I will not miss that at all.

The Canonical Me

Image: ©Marvel Comics

What is the optimal web page to use as your canonical link? Which one best represents you when sharing to others?

First impressions do count. Currently I am presenting a broad spread of online initial impressions. I have been thinking about how best to manage, streamline and rationalise these.

My thinking has always been that this blog functions as my canonical page. My personalised URL aidenkenny.me already points here. However it is important to regularly question my assumptions and correct course accordingly. Online conventions and mores never stand still. Eight years later, is a blog still the best front door into my online presence?

The common failing of all blogs (implicit in their structure) is that anyone arriving here for the first time is faced with the topmost entry of an eight-year stack of content. Depending on the nature of the particular post, the overall nature and intent of this blog is not always going to be as clear as it ought to be. There is no top-level overview or effective introduction. If this blog were not to serve as my default destination page in future, what are my alternative options?

The About.Me service attempts to address this issue, providing one simple landing page that contextualises and links to most of my online presences, Indeed my About.Me page is still the only link that I use in my Gmail footer. That page does update with my various feeds, but it has always seemed underwhelming to me for unquantifiable reasons. Most tellingly, I keep intending to go over there and freshen up the visuals and rewrite my bio, but I can never find any compelling reason to do so.

In many ways my Facebook page has become my most active and up-to-date web page. If only in aggregate because so many of my other web services log their activity into my Facebook feed. Even though it is pretty difficult to encounter someone without a Facebook account these days I am not comfortable putting that forward as my canonical page. I have never set out to accumulate a comprehensive collection of Facebook acquaintances, so the reach of my Facebook Friends List is not that broad.

My Twitter page is definitely not my canonical page any more either. These days I find that most of my friends are not tweeting as much as they used to. There is little conversation happening there amidst my circles. Personally, I am too busy to spend much time on the service, so my own tweets have become quite intermittent.

I can think of some people I know who could appropriately adopt their LinkedIn profile as their canonical page. While successfully presenting a comprehensive overview of my career achievements, I find that the mode of LinkedIn always feels somewhat historical to me. I do not get a sense that one can communicate the potential arising from current fields of interest and investigation. LinkedIn seems optimised to reassure people about what I already know that I can do, rather than engage with the risky improbabilities of the new.

Google resolutely intends for my Google+ profile to function as my canonical page. To date Google+ has yet to prove compelling to me, functioning more as an alternative RSS feed than as a social network. This highlights again how, regardless of my intentions for using any service, the amount of activity and communication by friends and peers is the ultimate driver of adoption levels.

What do you think? What URL do you use as your canonical web page to share?

UPDATE 30 April. Some people have pointed out that I missed one option here. To use my Klout profile, so that my canonical link can display my algorithmically-compiled authority on such topics as Branding, iPhone, Apps and er, Coffee.

Déjà-Vu Conversations

An interesting artifact of the accelerated social transitions that we are now experiencing.

Recently I have noticed a recurring social speed-bump in conversations with people who are dipping into my social media activity streams (and vice versa). The pattern runs something like this. One of us is recounting an anecdote, say about bringing the kids to the zoo last weekend, and the other party interjects with some variant of “oh yes, I saw something about that in your Facebook/Twitter/ Google+/Foursquare updates and was wondering what it was about...”

It is like a mild variant strain of Deja Vu.

The ‘ambient awareness’ identified by social scientists as a key component of our social media experience is there all right, but it is only an incomplete, partial awareness. Aspects of our real world conversations are haunted by indistinct outlines of semi-perceived experiential lacunae loitering around their edges.

My takeaway from this is that a lot of the social media content we are publishing is innately hindered, firstly, by its necessarily condensed syntax, and secondly by the partial nature of its consumption.

Someone accurately compared our social media activity streams to cocktail parties: in both situations when you arrive late you join the conversations at wherever point they are at and you do not backtrack. We read our friend’s status updates as we encounter them. We simply do not have time to go back and recap their complete chronology of all recent posts that we may have missed.

This is an interesting conundrum, as the trivial solution — to post more often and more accurately — would only increase the overall noise-to-signal ratio and might ultimately lead to some kind of a Tragedy Of The Commons zero-sum outcome. In the long term, and at a societal-level, I think that all of our conversational stratagems and conventions may evolve.

Has anyone else started to notice this as well?

Offset 2012 Tweets

I had an intention to tweet a 140 character summary for each of the speakers I saw at the Offset 2012 design conference. I made it through the first day and a half. Things got a bit spotty after that. Given that I am only intending to write a blog post about Michael Bierut’s Offset talk, this is a fun way to record some of my other impressions of this event.

#whowhatwherenow?

Google+ has now begun to establish itself as ‘Yet Another Inbox’ (YAIB) to be checked. It seems that every new Internet service establishes an onus on its users now to periodically devote time to checking for messages within the service. With the subsequent related risk of users then seeming to be standoffish for not responding to those messages.

Your number of inboxes will depend on your level of social media engagement. My own list presently includes Facebook, Twitter, Path, LinkedIn, Instagram, and still occasionally Flickr.

Although all of the various players would aspire to producing ‘One Social Network To Rule Them All’, I doubt that is feasible, and surely not desirable. So we can probably take it for now that our social graphs are not going to limit themselves to just one social network. And each of these networks creates a demand on our finite reserves of time.

Working from the basis that each of us wants to make best use of our social networks without getting drawn into a black hole of distraction and lost productivity. What then is our optimal strategy for managing all of our various social inboxes? A starting point is to think about each social network and what you intend to use it for. Who are you communicating with on each platform and for what purposes?

For example, it is easy to ring-fence LinkedIn as my online hub for career-related networking. There is the least amount of overlap between my LinkedIn connections and my other social networks. Messages within LinkedIn are invariably business-related. At this stage it is too early to say whether or not Google+ will enroach on business networking, but it is not improbable either.

The alternate approach is not to daisy-chain your social networks and to keep everything in separate  silos. Then all of the comments remain united within their own walled gardens. The downside of this approach is that only subsets of your total audience see your content on each of your unlinked networks. For instance, far more people see my Instagram photographs replicated on Facebook than on the native app. The comments on my Instagram photos are therefore split between both networks. The mandatory setting on Google+ is that no cross-posting is permitted from other services. Which is a valid stance for them to take, given the manner in which their Google Buzz product became simply a conduit for cross-posted tweets and never achieved a viable purpose of it own.

Sharing Your Sign-up (or Twaring Your Twign-up, Even)

Here is a novel UI pattern. I was investigating a new Twitter-related service called Twournal* yesterday. I was applying for a beta invite to see how it worked. The ‘Request An Invite Code’ button did not take me to a page requesting the usual level of authentication (typically an email, a Twitter login or a Facebook login). Rather, to request this particular invitation, the process required me to activate the above viral tweet that would let all of my followers know that I was making the application.

Become an Editor of Your User-Base

There are some good insights in Jack Dorsey’s deadpan presentation ‘Three keys to Twitter’s Success’ at the 99% Conference. He explains some interesting findings from his experience (starting at around 10:50), particularly how Twitter has grown by being “more or less an editor of its user-base and an editor of the usage”.

He recalls how they initially resisted a lot of the innovations being created outside of the company by their users. In the end they succeeded by being open enough to adopt the position of an editor and absorb all of the feedback and input, and then act on it and use it to drive rapid iteration and improvements.

My Twenty Primary iPod/iPhone Apps

As people do seem to be asking me about iPhone/iPod apps quite a lot these days, I am posting this here so that in future I shall have something I can link to. Borrowing the format established by the excellent First and 20 website I have listed the twenty apps that are most useful to me and thus have earned a spot on my home screen. I am forever adding and subtracting apps off my iPod, but this core set remains consistent and any new app needs to really make an impression on me to knock one of these twenty off my first screen in SpringBoard.

Ambient Intimacy

An interesting take on the status update.


Status updates explained from quub.com on Vimeo.

Tim O’Reilly’s Twitter Book

This is a useful example of the kind of beginners guides to Twitter that are now being published as the service gains a higher profile.

The Twitter Book — A Sneak Preview

View more presentations from O’Reilly Media.

O’Reilly Webcast: Twitter For Business

An hour-long webcast running over the opportunities for businesses using Twitter.

Evan Williams at TED 2009

Evan Williams gave this presentation at this year’s TED conference. As before, while his presentation style leaves a lot to be desired, his content is interesting and his supporting slides help to get his message across effectively. Of most interest to my research is his discussion about how the real-time search aspect of Twitter has definitely expanded the potential use-cases of the service. This presentation video runs to about seven minutes.

Microblogging for Marketers

This is an early interview with Peter Kim of Forrester on the possibilities for businesses of using Twitter and micro-blogging in marketing, from December 2007.

Twitter in Plain English

This video is a companion piece to the explanatory blogging presentation video I linked to earlier today.

It Is Very Simple, although Not Obvious

There are a number of worthwhile statements in Charlie Rose’s interview with Evan Williams, founder of Twitter Inc, from Friday 27 February 2009. These are worth noting in this blog for future reference. Williams is the second of two interviewees in this excerpted highlight version and his segment begins at 04:15. You can watch the complete interview here, but be aware that Williams is not the best verbal communicator.

Speaking from his previous experience as the founder of Blogger, he notes that it took time (culturally) for blogging to become normalised, and now that practice and having a MySpace or Facebook presence are seen as things that normal people do. Twitter is not yet at that point and people still wonder why others would “put themselves out there like that”.

Relevant quotes about Twitter:

“It is very simple, although not obvious.”

“It is something we did not know we needed (until we had it).”

“Living more publicly, more transparently can have powerful and positive effects... new people and new opportunities... an authentic and open way to live your life that people enjoy and makes everyone richer.”

Irish Graphic Design Companies on Twitter in 2009

This list is sorted by each design company’s starting date on Twitter, with the oldest first.

(This post was started in April 2009 and updated with additional company details throughout my research during the Summer. The total had only reached twelve companies by the time my research was submitted in October 2009.)

@CreativeDistrict
The Creative District: graphic design studio.
Since: January 2009.
@ArrivalDesign
Arrival: graphic design studio.
Since: February 2009.
@BFKDesign
BFK: branding and design company.
Since: February 2009.
@Xcommunications
Xcommunications: digital meda design company.
Since: February 2009.
@PenhouseDesign
Penhouse Design: graphic design studio.
Since: 20 April 2009.
@CandyCollective
Candy Collective: Irish graphic design evangelists.
Since: May 2009.
@CreativeMediaNI
Creative Media: graphic design studio.
Since: May 2009.
@DesignInch
Design Inch: graphic design studio.
Since: June 2009.
@CubedRoute
CubedRoute: web design agency.
Since: June 2009.
@DesignTactics
Design Tactics: branding and design company.
Since: June 2009.
@NewGraphic
NewGraphic: graphic design studio.
Since: June 2009.
@Ebow
Ebow: web design and graphic design company.
Since: September 2009.

Irish Graphic Designers On Twitter in 2009

This list is sorted by each designer’s starting date on Twitter, with the oldest first.

This post was started in April 2009 and updated with additional designer’s details throughout my research during the Summer. The discoverable total had only reached seventeen by the time my research was submitted in October 2009.

@AidenKenny
Aiden Kenny. Since: 22 March 2007.
@DaraghOToole
Daragh O’Toole. Since: 04 April 2007.
@DavidAirey
David Airey. Since: 17 March 2008.
@Pawelgra77
Pawel Grabowski. Since: 28 December 2008.
@YoussefSarhan
Youssef Sarhan. Since: 14 January 2009.
@AceJet170
Richard Weston. Since: 27 January 2009.
@EoinStan
Eoin Stanley. Since: 24 February 2009.
@/GaryMcginty
Gary McGinty. Since: 27 February 2009
@GillianReidy
Gillian Reidy. Since: 27 February 2009.
@Laughing_Lion
Jennifer Farley. Since: 05 March 2009.
@Miralize
Sean O’Grady. Since: 06 March 2009.
@Acatisacat
Fergus O’Neill. Since: 13 March 2009.
@Fogra
Sean O’Grady. Since: 14 March 2009.
@PaulGuinan
Paul Guinan. Since 16 March 2009.
@ConKennedy
Con Kennedy. Since: 24 April 2009.
@JamesCullen123
James Cullen. Since: 28 June 2009.
@HilaryT4S
Hilary Kenna. Since 22 September 2009.

Too-Wit-Too-Woo To Whom?

In answer to my semi-rhetorical question in my last post (about the seemingly ever-diminishing quanta of web content over time) my attention has been drawn to Twitter.com. This website facilitates ‘real time blogging’ where you have a maximum of only 140 characters to describe whatever it is that you are doing precisely right now.
One of the live examples that happened to be on the home page when I went and looked in was “Folding laundry, eating breakfast, a little morning surfing.” Evidently not somewhere to go in search of profundity, so far.
I gather that the high-concept idea is to constantly inform your circle of friends about what you are doing, in the manner of a constantly updated voice-mail message. Seemingly this can become quite addictive, so I am not signing up just yet. Also, these services can devolve into echo chambers unless a lot of your friends use them.
Twitter.com is the new venture from Evan Williams, one of the original creators of Blogger, who subsequently set up the podcasting service Odeo. On the basis of his strong track record it is probably a phenomenon worth watching.

UPDATE One – 11 March
I have to append this link to a humorous visualisation of that blogging devolution meme.

UPDATE Two – 22 March
Having pushed through a particularly busy patch in work, I have now taken the plunge and set up my own Twitter account. The first think I learned was to turn of the SMS functionality after my mobile was quickly swamped with micro-posts.

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