Agency.com

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.

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