Twitter - Fail Whale Brand Strategy

I like twitter a lot. Its so uncomplicated. If you haven't heard of twitter yet, duuuuuude better catch up! Twitter is essentially a micro-blogging service where people input text to keep their friends or "followers" updated on what's been happening in their lives. Twitter has a character limit of 14o, so its sorta like a MSN/Gtalk status message only with more character limit and which people online can follow

Twitter is cool but more often than not the site seems to be down, particularly when there is heavy usage during an event like Mac world expo etc. Although the site suffers from technical glitches, it still has extremely loyal followers and its popularity is growing day by day. So question, how come web surfers like us who have no patience with technical glitches, still continue to patronise twitter? Answer: Twitter has come across as a community product. Twitter communicates the site unavailibity through a Fail whale graphic and is extremely open about site outages and failures. This honesty is endearing and comes across as genuine. The Fail whale graphic greatly helps in this cause. The image now has a huge fan following online and there's even a mechandize line based on the fail whale image.

The fail whale image above, was created by Yiying Lu and apparently symbolizes a Beluga Whale in distress. A beluga whale is known to utter high pitched twitters. The image of a whale in distress being resucued by birds seems like a quirky, open, honest & endearing way of communicating a problem and this is what I guess, keeps people loyal to twitter, although if the glitches continue unfixed, the user patience might run out.

The message here is to maintain a dialogue with the users about a genuine problem and this in a way fosters transparency and trust in a brand. This is also a great example of how building a community around your brand can help during bad times.