Tweet The Rainbow…
Few things in the 2.0 era have received so much buzz so quickly as Skittle’s recent social media effort. I logged on to Twitter yesterday to a literal hashstorm of all things Skittles. I realize people get excited about candy, but this was ridiculous. What was going on? Obviously I did what any responsible digital marketing professional would do–I went to Skittles.com.
Something wasn’t right–why did Skittles.com take me to Twitter’s search page with a little branded overlay on the top left? Where’s the flashed out, high res animated page loader? Where’s the ambiguously organized homepage with different content engagement opportunities? All I could see were different users’ tweets about Skittles. I clicked around the overlay, and was taken to….Facebook? This was something entirely new.
While many are quick to shoot down this type of effort, I think Skittles deserves praise for embracing social media in such an unabashed fashion. They expressed trust in their consumers, and realized that if consumers have good things to say about Skittles then they should welcome and facilitate that conversation. The candy brand has since redirected the homepage to Facebook, but the twitter search is still accessible via the Chatter section.
I don’t at all consider this a failure as much as I do a lesson for all brands. In this instance, there was so much media buzz around the campaign that users took to immature mischief to get themselves in the spotlight. Still, it’s a step in the right direction and shows that consumers hold the power–a notion that Skittles clearly understands. Companies are going to have to develop innovative strategies if they want to fully leverage the power of consumers, and as these efforts become more commonplace we’ll see that giving consumers control can do great things for brands.
Editor’s Note: Revised from previous version to previous statement. Campaign not pulled–the homepage was just re-directed to Facebook.
Tags: campaign, facebook, interactive, skittles, social media, Twitter
This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 4th, 2009 at 4:50 pm and is filed under Campaigns, Interactive Marketing, New Media, social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
March 4th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
Campaign wasn’t pulled. The MediaPost article contains a link to an update (“Correction, the skittle’s twitter link has been moved to chatter”) which albeit is more valid, but not completely valid.
Skittle’s campaign started with the homepage as the wikipedia article, and then transitioned to the twitter search, before transitioning to the current facebook fanpage as homepage. these 3 links, as well as the flickr and youtube links are still accessible via that little flash widget overlay. Twitter search was always accessible via “Chatter”, it was just also accessible as the home page for a some days, as was the wikipedia article, as will the facebook, and I assume the flickr n youtube pages will get the same treatment.
MediaPost jumped the gun, and everyone else seems to be following suit.
March 4th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
Interesting, Pierre, I never saw the wiki. I was taken immediately to Twitter. We’ll see if they continue to rotate what comes up as homepage. Either way, I still maintain that this is a commendable effort on Skittle’s part.
March 5th, 2009 at 11:58 am
I think that this is ultimately FTW for MARS in general and Skittles in particular. I’ll be interested to see what kind of engagement they get after the novelty-factor wears off but, regardless, I really like seeing a company embrace this approach. While the marketing rags are hemming and hawing about whether this is good or bad publicity, even the trolls will be at the cash register stocking up on candy.
March 5th, 2009 at 12:38 pm
Like the post Jeremy and agree this is a great direction for a brand to take and we will all learn a lot from observing Skittles.com over the coming months. Here is another great article about the site http://adage.com/digitalnext/article?article_id=134995.
March 5th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
Interesting to note, according to the skittles wiki, that by the end of the first day 500,000 FB users had joined the fanpage. Bottom line: people are engaging with the brand, and it’s a rare feat to create a campaign this memorable.