Two weeks ago Facebook introduced a new look and feel for the Facebook company, not the app, but the company, in an effort to bring clarity about the products and services which make up the Facebook eco system. A new logo to “better communicate our ownership structure to the people and businesses who use our services”. I’d ask if a logo is the best way to achieve this and if having two things, a company and an app with the same name is confusing? To understand how this example of social media’s difficult relationship with branding came to pass, you have to go back in time to look at the medium’s birth.

During the 20th century the social groups we created around us were commonly based on circumstance and shared interests. Social networks came to prominence after the millennium as platforms in a world that believed it had moved away from this established order. Newspaper sales were dropping, smartphones were just emerging and tech was seen as a positive instigator of change within our societies.

A more open and connected world than ever before, supported by utopian visions like Facebook’s, “to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together”. We saw a shift change from being the audience for the monolithic media brands of the past, to being an interactive part of these open platforms of the future. Everyone was ready for their 15 minutes of fame. What could go wrong?

ONE WAY TRAFFIC

When I joined Twitter in 2007 it was selling itself as a ‘social utility’ and not a social network. You shared your status to a timeline via SMS with a small select group of people. My thrilling debut was “looking at twitter for the first time” and it seemed like the way you used it, based on reading tweets from the three other people I followed. And that really didn’t change for a long while, it wasn’t interactive, you broadcasted and it was pretty inane. Looking at my first tweets for this piece has made me cringe harder than I have in a long while. Highlights from 2008 include “On the A1 with 50 miles to go. God im tired” and “Using Twitter on my iphone for the first time. Good interface”. This wasn’t something that really needed a brand, but the toy of a few dull tech nerds, me included.

Twitter and the other social networks acted like software companies and in turn followed their brand playbooks, with little need for any brand apart from a few visual assets; a logo, a colour palette and some recognisable icons. This product-first software brand was and is the norm in a lot of Silicon Valley. In the minds of these company founders their products were universal, product was all anyone needed to know about and that was enough. The key mistake here was the belief that social media brands were software brands.

Today Twitter finds itself as the media channel of choice for the President of the USA. He uses it as a weaponised direct channel to his fiercest supporters, bypassing the need for mainstream media and in turn often the need for truth. The ability for anyone, however famous, to direct their thoughts into the world, without them being edited or controlled, makes the disruption much more powerful than the employees at the podcast company Odeo, who came up with Twitter in a one day brainstorm, could have ever envisaged.

If someone wrote a hate letter in Microsoft Word then went on to commit a murder, the role of the software would not be given a second thought, it’s simply a tool, a replacement for a pen. If a similar person writes an open letter with intent to broadcast a live shooting on Facebook, the platform is seen as very much part of the problem.

This is the difference that the leadership at both Twitter and Facebook took a while to face up to. They are to some extent responsible for the use of the platform as much as creation of the platform. You can see in the blog post announcing the new Facebook company logo that this in their intent, but a new logo is not what this brand needs.

THE ROLE OF REPUTATION

In the book Winning in Your Own Way the strategist Robert Bean outlines an organisation’s brand as having three components. It has its product or service, its culture and its reputation. He calls this the brand’s “single organising principle” and I have found it a useful quick way of mapping and analysing the three components every successful brand needs to consider.

None of the leading social media platforms have easy brands to penetrate. We mostly learn about their addictive products by using them, or seeing others on them. We interact with our friends on Facebook, but we don’t know much about the motivations of the platform that provides that connection, so in turn we know little about their culture or those who make the products. Facebook has tried to softly build its place in the world in the past, often by using one of its senior executives like Sheryl Sandberg, to talk about the company’s vision publicly. Her reach though was a tiny number of the two billion active Facebook users.

You could argue we know little about many of the brands we interact with daily, but most of them don’t have the impact on our lives social media has. These networks have can affect our mental health, sell our personal information, lose our data and put our children at risk. When times were good they had the chance to create a strong narrative about their intention in the world, but they were moving too fast and breaking things to build a brand. It’s not like it was a never seen before problem. Go back 2000 years and the Roman writer and former slave Publilius Syrus reminded the leaders of the day that “a good reputation shines brightly in dark times”. His commentary on behaving ethically by those that wielded power seems apt as Mark Zuckerberg sits in front of the senate committee. But what could he have done differently?

Beyond some of the ethical, product decisions he’s made, Zuckerberg has failed to ever really communicate to the outside world. Most social media brands don’t undertake traditional marketing and so spend little money on brand building. But buying media space to tell your brand’s story will help many companies build a positive global image and support them in times of hardship. Apple has shown the power of it over a long period. Back in the late 1990s, Steve Jobs upon his return to Apple announced the Crazy Ones commercials by saying, “Even a great brand needs investment and caring”. He knew Apple was one of the world’s top brands, but he needed to feed its brand, to tell its intent, and even after his passing it is the story that Apple tells first and not the product features. Portal, the new Facebook video-calling device, is arguably the first time that Facebook has engaged in marketing in a memorable way and that’s probably due to the simplicity of the product. The less said about 2014’s the Chairs Are Like Facebook campaign, the better.

The world’s largest social channels have become more than they were ever envisaged to be and in turn have become much more than the software platforms their creators saw them as. I’m not saying that Facebook and other platforms should go back in time, but they should now understand their needs as media brands. These needs aren’t about a smart container word marque, however nicely drawn, but about really establishing their place in the world. What’s their vision? How are they going to learn from Cambridge Analytica? And why, do they still not realise the irony in being a communication platform that is bad at communicating?

GOOD TECH VS BAD TECH

Social media is at an inflection point in its history. Growing societal concerns around screen time, lowering trust in the platforms driven by scandal and questions around ethical business practice, track to a bigger conversation around the role of technology in our lives. Some changes are starting to happen and Twitter is beginning to understand its need to make a stand, banning political ads had a small effect on their bottom line, but a big effect on their reputation and was met on the platform itself with broadly positive sentiment.

I believe the the tech sector will start to be seen as two sides of a coin. The good side, dealing with issues of the day, acknowledging them and dealing with them in a responsible way. And the bad side, born of excess capital with little regard for human cost, blitz-scaling and focused primarily on growth, these brands will increasingly feel the wrath of a tired public. Some brands have recently begun to navigate from one side to the other. Uber is undergoing its rehabilitation from the boorish bad boy of tech, led by their ex CEO and his various PR blunders, to a new, safety-focused, driver-first brand, building bridges with the cities is has angered.

Facebook has some admirable thoughts about their place in the world. If they truly believe in them they should be on posters on our commute, in our hands at night or on the TV we watch, not hidden in the About Us section on their website. Great products can change the world, but the product alone is never enough.

James Greenfield is a regular CR columnist and the Founder and Creative Director of design and branding studio Koto