You have brand guidelines, don’t you? Or, more specifically, guidelines for how your corporate identity can be used?
Many companies do, and post these on their corporate sites.
Here’s a straightforward way of doing it: Yara provide their logo in EPS and PNG formats, explain the meaning of the logo, give us the colour reference, and provide guidelines about the whitespace to be left around the logo.
So you know about asking people to comply with your guidelines, but here’s something to think about: Twitter have published their new guidelines for using the Twitter trademark over the weekend, and these will require some adjustment for most websites. (Hat tip to Social Media Today).
You don’t think of Twitter as corporate yet? Maybe not, but nevertheless, they have a brand identity to protect.
They suggest that you use the phrase ‘Follow me [us] on Twitter’ either with or without a Twitter logo, but that you do not manipulate the logos, use an outdated version of the logo, or create your own button or mark using their logo. And most certainly you shouldn’t incorporate the Twitter logo with your own in any way.
The word Twitter should be spelled out and capitalised; and the word Tweets is to be used to refer to the messages or updates.
This is no more than any company should be doing. Making it clear what is or isn’t acceptable use of the corporate identity – and making those guidelines easily available – is vital, and should be included on any corporate website.
Because of the nature of the Twitter tool, they’ve gone a step further, and say that you should not display a screenshot of any person’s Tweets without their permission. Again, this isn’t a surprising guideline, but it does mean that many sites may need to review their content to see whether they comply with this one.
I’ve revised our sidebar to be sure that we comply with their guidelines, and will be reviewing our web content. Do all elements of your web estate conform, including not only the corporate website but also your other social media outposts, such as your Facebook page?
Lucy is Editor at Corporate Eye
