The StockTwits Blog at blog.stocktwits.com was the corporate communication property for the platform — a custom WordPress® theme carrying company news, product announcements, market observations, and the voices of the founding team. Inside an ecosystem where the main platform was a high-velocity stream of trader chatter, the blog was where the company stepped out of the stream and spoke deliberately.
One home, several voices
The interesting design problem on a corporate blog inside a community platform is the multi-voice question. The StockTwits Blog hosted CEO Howard Lindzon, Chief Psychology Officer Phil Pearlman, co-founder Soren Macbeth, and the product and marketing teams. Each had a distinct register — Lindzon’s macro-and-markets perspective, Pearlman’s trader-psychology and behavioural pieces, product announcements written in a different voice from either of them. A blog theme that flattened those into a single editorial tone would have lost the personality that made the property worth reading. A theme that fragmented them visually would have made the property feel like four blogs sharing a domain.
The build settled on a unifying visual device — the “bloggy” mascot illustration that became the visual identity of the property — and let the author-byline carry voice distinction inside a consistent template. The mascot did the brand-identity work; the template did the format-consistency work; the byline and the writing did the voice-distinction work. Readers landing on a Pearlman piece knew they were on the StockTwits Blog before they read a word, and knew they were reading Pearlman by the third sentence.
The corporate voice inside a community platform
StockTwits had roughly 90,000 registered users by early 2011 and was growing rapidly. The corporate blog was the primary communication channel with that community, the surface that announced new features and platform changes the active users needed to know about. It went live with dense Wayback Machine coverage starting January 2, 2011, and ran continuously through that year. The corporate blog was the platform-voice surface inside the broader StockTwits property cluster I was building that same window.
- The work: Custom WordPress theme for the StockTwits corporate blog at blog.stocktwits.com; multi-voice publishing inside a unifying brand identity
- Platform: WordPress, custom theme
- Period: Late 2010 / early 2011 (live by January 2, 2011)
- Client: StockTwits (Howard Lindzon, co-founder)
- Position in the ecosystem: Corporate blog in the spring 2011 ecosystem buildout
The bloggy mascot survives in archived captures from the live site (a 559×600 px illustration, recovered from the Wayback Machine). The pattern of using a single visual device to unify multiple author voices on one corporate property is one that comes up again on every multi-voice publisher engagement I take on.
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