Well-known marketing and public relations pundit
Steve Rubel thinks that Twitter is peaking, which means it's poised to begin an inevitable decline into irrelevance, if that slide hasn't already begun. The three reasons he cites are: 1)
celebrities; 2)
disorganization; and 3)
superficiality. While he thinks that time will tell whether or not the Twitter team can work its way through this innovator's dilemma, I actually think Twitter has a more fundamental problem as a brand, one that may be harder to overcome than the technological challenges it faces.
I introduce you to the famous Twitter Fail Whale:
Image: screenshot of Twitter over-capacity failure
This lovely illustration shows up anytime Twitter experiences a problem, such as too many users hitting the service at the same time. If you're a moderate to heavy user of Twitter and you haven't seen the Fail Whale yet, consider yourself lucky, but you'll meet it eventually. In fact, the
Fail Whale is so integral to the Twitter experience, that it's spawned a whole sub-culture: there are Fail Whale sculptures, T-shirts, baked goods, fan clubs, stories, LEGO dioramas, 3-D renderings, tattoos, dresses,
YouTube video clips, cakes, pastries, alcoholic drinks, and there have even been Fail-Whale themed events.
Now if you're running a startup like Twitter, you've got to love all of this attention, especially if you subscribe to the notion that any publicity is good publicity. Except when that publicity speaks to the brand's promise in an ineluctably negative way. You have a service that, while it appeals to millions of users, still has a long way to go before so-called mainstream people actually understand how it could be useful to them. You have a great, memorable name, in fact, Inc. Magazine, says
Twitter is one of the ten greatest company names of all time.
And yet, your most memorable, and perhaps even most lovable symbol, the Fail Whale, is a totem of malfunction, a promise that your service breaks so often that it's been cast as a recurring character in your daily show. Technology early-adopters tend to be a bit more tolerant of a tool's failures, because often they're involved in the making and marketing of such tools and they understand how difficult it can be, but with Twitter poised for super-charged growth, a lot of the new, incoming users who will join are going to be less forgiving and less patient. And if they begin to encounter the Fail Whale as much as the early adopters have, they're going to associate breakdown with the Twitter brand experience. But I don't think these new users are going to make sculptures and cupcakes and YouTube videos. I think they'll just leave and never come back.
Rubel makes a good point that Twitter has some fundamental problems to fix, lest it lose its core audience, who've driven the company's innovation. But the Fail Whale is as much a technological challenge, as it is a branding challenge. The best thing Twitter can do is make the Fail Whale disappear. Twitter need to make the Fail Whale as invisible as that other whale that was feared but never seen: Twitter has to make their whale as mythical and rare as that other fictional white whale, Moby Dick.
Position the brand for success. Not for fail-whale-ure.