Woke up to find #skittles and Extreme Social are trending on Twitter search. Why?
Agency.com and Mars replaced www.skittles.com with a mashup of redirects to social media channels overlaid by a small navigation widget:
HOME: The already famous skittles Twitter search link. This is your home page. Take it away, folks.
PRODUCTS: Product information on your first click, then it becomes Wikipedia. What do YOU think our products are? Have at it. Wikipedians will keep us safe.
MEDIA: Video is their YouTube channel and Pics is, naturally a Flickr redirect. (Yes, of course I got pictures for thie post there. Who needs a social media press release when the assets are this easy to pick up and embed?)
CHATTER: Same as HOME: the Twitter search page
FRIENDS: Facebook page
CONTACT: well, ok, no social media hack here.
Terrific, self-propagating buzz, making the home page a Twitter search. It predictably stirred the Twitter community right up, the word Skittles “trended” to the top of Twitter Search and lots and lots and lots of word of mouth ensued.
Searching Twitter for Skittles and agency quickly reveals that Agency.com is behind the campaign and that agency Modernista did pretty much the same thing with their site. But as Brian Morrissey of AdWeek blog AdFreak puts it:
The Skittles site is an interesting case study for a consumer goods company. Let’s face it: Why would anyone go to a packaged-goods Web site? But nowadays, in social media, people are talking about all sorts of stuff. Agency.com gets that with a “chatter” link that pulls up the results of a “skittles” search on Twitter. It could be on to something. Does it really matter if Modernista or Zeus Jones got there first?
Did they realize the Twitter search would get graffiti’d and spammed? Of course they did. People like to see their mark on the wall. A floating box requires visitors to reveal their age and opt into a disclaimer about the content.
My first impressions? (In tweets, natch):
- Waking up to word about the #skittles Twitter marketing stunt rt @kitson Here’s @Mashable‘s take: http://sn.im/mashskit0302
If you’ve not seen it: www.skittles.com.is =a twitter search page for skittles. WOM + Buzz: generated. Curses: posted. Agency: Agency.com
re: skittles PRODUCTS links go to a wiki. FRIENDS: Facebook page MEDIA: YouTube. quite the social media diving in.
Lots of comments pro and con. I think it’s a great campaign, will get them LOADS of press, and experiments with some fun concepts in skating out a brand’s social media territory.
Related articles by Zemanta
- Skittles Site Receives an Extreme Social Makeover (mashable.com)
- Skittles.com: Interweb the rainbow. Taste the Rainbow. (tsurch.com)
- The New Skittles Website Is A Twitter Search For “Skittles” (laughingsquid.com)
- Twitter tastes the rainbow – the Skittles rainbow (inquisitr.com)
- Is Skittles.com a glimpse of the business model for Twitter? (RexBlog.com)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=cf842986-953c-4e61-b649-e2002704a4e6)
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Not sure what I think about this, Laura. It seems social democracy takes a front seat over the company’s own voice. I know social media is power of the people, but where is the consistency with brand messaging nowadays? It’s like the telephone game round and round… and the company’s not even on the line.
Hopefully they do some back-and-forth and don’t completely let it be. Thanks for your insights on this!
Not the wisest move. Filter is needed…kids wanting to learn about the product shall come across that page…and sometimes people just want facts from a company not the opinions and perceptions of other consumers.
I’m one of the ‘bad kids’ I think and had to bomb that feed with the word F*CK….just to test and see if there was a filter: http://twitpic.com/1srl8
Thankfully there are almost no kids on Twitter anyway, so I don’t feel so bad:
http://www.istrategylabs.com/twitter-2009-demographics-and-statistics/
See you at SXSW!
P
from LJF: i edited this to replace that U with an *
I’m interested to see if this a multi-part campaign? Because quite frankly, it’s a novelty that as Rex Hammock put it, “has a short half-life”. Once the twittersphere moves on to the next trend, and without a “next phase” from Skittles, does skittles.com become a ghost town?
Some comments on the security aspects (and a link to this page) at:
http://www.clerkendweller.com/2009/3/3/In-the-Dark-with-Skittles
Laura,
I used the same All your base reference but your version is one better! Seems the debate is around content vs attention. A lot of folks think the content posted debases the brand; others think all press is good press and that skittles was indeed an impactful campaign.
do folks here think this was a one-off, or something that other brands could embrace? would the twitterverse stay polite in future variations on this theme?
http://www.gravity7.com/blog/media/2009/03/i-want-candy-skittles-embraces-twitter.html