twitter biz: logo or photo?

I’m a strong supporter of twitter as another medium to get your message out.  The benefits of having a twitter presence have been well documented but lately I’ve been thinking a lot about my ‘twitter business persona’, for lack of a better term.  How much of me do I want to reveal? or you want to see?  I want @businessready to be the online face of the company so I want it to be professional and approachable for ‘the little guy’ but at the same time be personal.  As I was having these thoughts the other day I looked at the visual roll of who I was ‘following’ and noticed … not a lot of logo’s (and I do follow companies).  I had to tweet:

wondering if logo’s have a negative appeal on twitter? would you rather see my face for a company profile?

I was hoping for a definitive ‘yes’ or ‘no’ but, really, life is never like that.  There are always exceptions. Hmmm.  Time to do a bit of research using twitter search.  I looked at a lot of companies (small and large) using twitter to see: (a) what kind of things they were tweeting about and (b) if they had a logo or a picture.

As well, I have good peeps who follow me and their feedback to my tweet helped solidify my current opinion on twitter user types: personal, corporate, or professional.  It was @cputney’s response that nailed it for me:

@businessready I think you should present as WR of BR, rather than just BR. The value in BR is you! Playing up the co. only works for IBM.

How true!  The value is in me in a professional capacity!  So, I came up with the following user profiles:

• personal: ok, this one is painfully obvious as to subject matter and picture but keep in mind it does not exclude promoting your company. I mean, really, how much of our day is attributable to our work?
• corporate: this is the “IBM” information stream.  I see this as another medium to provide technical support: product features and updates, known bugs and support issues, general corporate updates.  It truly is company information with a peppering of personality.  I would assume this profile would only ‘follow’ company suppliers and/or company staff and would definitely have the company logo as their picture.  The author of the tweets can be many different employees of the company.
• professional: this is where the twitter name is the company name but we let everyone know who is behind the tweets (e.g. @TechCrunch).  We provide general information, pushing back to our website, and ask questions of the community.  Mostly it’s my professional viewpoint while I’m at Business Ready not my personal life (e.g. what I’m wearing for my date tonight).  This profile will ‘follow’ things of interest to me, Wendy of Business Ready, and should include a photo of me as the picture.

Notice I didn’t segment by company size.  A small company can still have a corporate twitter profile if that is appropriate for your business (a good example is @dabbledb).  As well, you don’t have to limit yourself to one twitter account.  Go nuts!

The only thing I struggled with is the lack of consistent branding.  I’ve been taught I need to be consistent with logo usage across all mediums which is why my original picture was the company logo.  It really sticks out on the ‘following’ visual roll which is good, non?  Well, as I am a professional user it really should be my picture (it’s my voice).  I’ve reconciled with myself by making sure my background image includes some of the company product icons (although you can’t see this on tweetdeck, friendfeed, etc. Sigh.).

Right then.  Picture it is.  Now you have a visual to go with my online rants