I’m a big fan of Twitter search. I have a cool plugin for Firefox that brings back the latests tweets for a search term and displays them above the same results for Google. It’s one of the reasons that Google is rumoured to be building similar functionality, to bring back real-time, real-people sentiments. But does Branding have to change in a world where only plain text is available? Without the fancy logo that surrounds your brand, can your customer find you?

Here’s an example to illustrate my point. Once upon a time there was a wonderfully innovative mobile phone brand called Orange. Famously, millions of dollars were spent to come up with the catchy strap-line “The future’s bright, the future’s Orange” and the brand became a case-study for marketing students of the 90′s.

But what happens to Orange when you take away the strapline and type just the brand into Twitter search? The  results include chocolate sprinkles, a county in California, termites, Orange juice, orange rolls etc…

Try the same test with Vodafone. Type the single word with no qualification into Twitter and every single result refers to the mobile phone / internet brand.

Why is this important? Well increasingly, smart branding people are using sites like Twitter to monitor brand sentiment. The power of having an uncensored feedback loop from your customers around the world allows marketing people to tweak the mix to satisfy the needs of their audience. Monitoring brand sentiment on Social media platforms is in it’s early days, but it is a lot easier when you have a distinctive brand.

Try it for youself. What do you get when you type your brand into search.twitter.com ? Is it a lock-out? Is the whole page filled with people talking about you, or is it muddied with other things?