Check all media outputs before choosing a name

South West Trains are the company that I use on my daily commute to and fro work. Generally they give a good service. Their staff generally have a good attitude, there is the odd grumpy one and unfortunately a few who seem that their sole intention is to wind up passengers and they succeed.

One of the services they now off is a twitter feed and I must admit it is generally pretty good. They have answered most of my questions put to them. They do have a tendency to ignore the more spotter related queries though. Can't blame them really.

What I can blame them for is the choice of twitter name @sw_trains. On the surface is looks OK. @southwesttrains is probably a bit long so an abbreviation was needed. However, did the person, or probably in the railways case a committee, thoroughly research the name? Focusing on making sure that the name can be used of all methods of communication. Print and web would be fine but where the name falls down in on the scrolling displays on the trains themselves. For the displays cannot cope with the underscore. It OK with the @ symbol but obviously the German manufactures Siemens, who built the trains, didn’t expect anyone to want to use an underscore. So the message on the screen does read 'Follow us on Twitter: @SWSTrains. The middle S being dark text on a light background rather than the normal light on dark. I assume the S stands for 'Special Character'? From a distance it is very difficult to make out what it is supposed to be. So for advertising their twitter feed it is a big fat #FAIL.

So the moral of the story is – before choosing a name, logo or trademark phrase consider all the media you want to use it on. Test it out. Obviously the people at South West Trains didn't test the twitter name on the trains before choosing it.