grenade fishing

One of the hardest part of branding is getting everyone to agree on a voice. It seems silly, doesn’t it? That a company should have “a voice.”

Gone are the days of serious three-syllable verbiage (thank God). I am a big, big fan of humor in web messaging. Google has done quite a bit of this, which was a huge service to brand managers who like out-of-the-box creativity. Humor, when executed well, give companies more personality. Having personality makes the experience more “human.” In other words, computers don’t have personalities, people do.

Here is an example of  Flickr’s “site is down” messaging. It made me smile. (Instead of being upset their site is down.) Brilliant.