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.