Lots of great data, no single story
Twitter's data was remarkable, and it lived across a lot of teams and products. Each one held a piece of the story. Nobody was telling the whole thing.
Twitter was one of our first big clients and one of our longest. We were there for the good years, back when Twitter was where the internet went to find out what's happening, and a lot of that time went into one question: how do you turn a firehose of public conversation into something businesses will happily pay for?
The context
A new revenue stream, built to grow
When Twitter brought Gnip in, it got a real business with real customers. The job was turning it into Twitter Data: a product people understood, and a revenue stream that could grow far beyond where it started.
The role we played
One crew, a lot of teams
We worked mostly with Twitter Data, and right alongside developer relations, partner marketing, the transparency team, go-to-market, corporate communications, and the global brand team as the rebrand rolled out. On most days the job was making sure all of them were telling the same story.
Some of that work started before the deal was even done, with a weekend alongside Gnip's leadership shaping the presentation they brought to Twitter. (We ended up framing it in a shadow box.)
What we built together
From pipeline to platform
We designed the Twitter Data platform end to end, its UI and its whole experience, and built the partner marketing portals around it. We worked with Twitter's product design teams on Feather, their design system, and brought Fabric, MoPub, Crashlytics, Numbers, and the Ads API along with it.
- Positioning for Twitter's API ecosystem
- Messaging rewritten for enterprise buyers
- Data offerings shaped into products sales could actually sell
- The Twitter Data platform, designed end to end
- Partner marketing portals
- Contributions to Feather, Twitter's product design system
- Video for go-to-market and the developer platform
By the end, the platform mostly sold itself.
From signal to system
Stories that outlived launch week
We also helped Twitter tell people why its data mattered.
- Turned a single Harris Poll report into a year of content
- Led copy for Twitter's email programs
- Wrote and shaped keynote talks, including SXSW
- Directed data storytelling and visualization
On the event side, we helped bring Flock, Flight, and international developer events to life, along with plenty of merch and swag, so the story sounded the same at a hackathon as it did on the SXSW stage.
The outcome
Built to grow, and it did
Twitter Data grew into one of the company's biggest platforms, and went from a drawer full of powerful tools to a profit center that kept itself running.
The takeaway
Great data needs a great storyteller.
Twitter's data was valuable from day one. It became a much bigger business once people could see what it was for.
