Your Strategy is Showing

When I was at Naked we used to have a joke for an advertisement that was little more than a strategy line: We'd say "your strategy is showing." If you work in the marketing world you know what I'm talking about, it's those ads where someone wrote a line about what the brand was trying to accomplish with its marketing and rather than coming up with a creative way to represent that they just made the line the ad. (I can't think of a really good one off the top of my head, so if you've got one chime in.) Anyway, I was looking at Twitter when they first launched their redesign and all I could think was "your strategy's showing." Obviously it's not an ad, but when you see the labels on the tabs at the top its so obvious that they let their strategy slip into their nomenclature decisions. For those who haven't noticed the new tabs are "home," "connect" and "discover." Home is good, it works, I get it. But connect and discover are very funny choices for a company that is otherwise almost always very impressive in its UI decisions (it's sort of amazing how far they've come since they were an organization that outsourced design completely). Anyway, back to "connect" and "discover," what do they mean? "Connect" is interesting and I really like the new activity feed view, but I certainly wouldn't think of what lies beneath as being represented best by the word "connect." "Discover" takes things even further. That's one of those words that gets thrown around (we used it at Percolate for awhile) even though I'm fairly convinced no normal person on the planet has ever though of what they do when they find cool stuff on the internet as "discovery." The beauty, of course, is that if you've got a platform with however many hundreds of millions of people used Twitter than you can actually define these things. Often, that's the best solution since no other word perfectly encapsulates what it is your trying to represent. We ultimately went with "brew" to describe the main Percolate dashboard for brands because it's something unique and because of the relationship with clients, something we can be sure to define as part of the on boarding process. But still, it's funny when you catch someone with their strategy showing.