I’m sure you’ve heard about what Skittles have been doing lately. If you visited the site a few days ago you would have seen the skittles.com homepage redirect to the twitter search page showing all of the conversations on twitter that mentioned “skittles.” There has been a lot of commentary about what skittles has been doing and not everyone agrees. So far twitter has redirected the homepage to twitter, facebook, and now is now point to the skittles wikipedia page.
Personally I like what skittles is doing. They are introducing the world their social media presence and it’s great. Those people who are not familiar with tools like twitter will quickly understand what is going on. It’s a unique and dynamic experiment and it’s great to see a brand like skittles experimenting with their marketing efforts. I scanned the wikipedia skittles page and I definitely learned a lot about that delicious little candy including more about their recent marketing efforts.
According to the wiki page:
On Tuesday, March 3, 2009, Skittles launched a bold new web-based marketing campaign that replaced their website with a real-time Twitter feed[1]. For a little more than 24 hours, any post on Twitter that included the word “skittles” was aggregated and displayed on the Skittles homepage. Widely reported on, many praised Skittles for their innovative use of social media, while others criticized Skittles’ decision to allow comments to appear uncensored. Throughout the short-lived campaign, there were sporadic reports of inappropriate language, including racial slurs. Many marketers also debated the wisdom of employing Twitter, which is known to have a much older demographic[2], given that the candy maker typically targets a younger consumer[3]. On Wednesday, March 4, 2009, Skittles ended the Twitter component of the campaign and linked instead to its Facebook fan page. Some watchers suggested that Skittles had redirected its site to Facebook as a result of the inappropriate language appearing on Twitter[4], while others argued it demonstrated masterful media management by radically changing the story at the height of public attention[5]. By the end of the first day of Skittles’ Facebook strategy, more than 500,000 Facebook users had joined its fan page.
If you ask me, I think we need to see more brands getting out there and experimenting with their marketing efforts.
what do you think about the skittles marketing strategy?
