Every company needs a mission statement of some sort. Some companies have managed to build mission statements of superior corporate poetry, concise and inspirational in equal measure. For more Twitter-related jobs, click here. Based on online sentiment—and a tacit admission by the company’s own CFO—Twitter’s mission statement failed to achieve any of that. Here it is, in all its convoluted glory:
“Reach the largest daily audience in the world by connecting everyone to their world via our information sharing and distribution platform products and be one of the top revenue generating Internet companies in the world.”
Insult to injury: Twitter missed a major opportunity at branding when it didn’t constrict its mission statement to 140 characters, the maximum length of a Tweet. In theory, it’s not hard to craft a competent, upbeat mission statement. Take Google, for instance: “Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Or Warby Parker: “Warby Parker was founded with a rebellious spirit and a lofty objective: to offer designer eyewear at a revolutionary price, while leading the way for socially conscious businesses.” Or Patagonia: “Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.” Or any number of others—but instead of following in the footsteps of corporations that did it right, Twitter decided to spit out a mess of repetition (“world” appears three times in one sentence) and grammatical errors, a run-on sentence that’s clearly the result of a committee anxious to cram too many concepts into too short a space. The sentence itself means little: what is a “platform product”? What is the “world” to which Twitter wants to connect everyone? Also, companies are in the business of making money; that’s not something worth placing in the mission statement—and it’s not especially uplifting. Maybe Twitter could hire some of the Web’s cleverest Twitter-ers for a do-over.
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