Skittles Tastes the Social Media Rainbow

• Mar 4th, 2009
• Posted by Cody Goins
• Posted in Facebook, Social Media, Social Media Case Study, Social Media News, Twitter

Ok, Skittles. So you’ve successfully gotten online users to spend an inordinate amount of time in the past few days talking about Skittles. The interest of fruit-flavored candy lovers, as well as that of various social media mavens has officially been piqued, and all eyes are now focused intently on the conversation surrounding your brand. Some have even started calling your new campaign the “end of the homepage (as we know it).”

The best laid plans of candy makers and social media marketers couldn’t possibly go awry, right?

We like that Skittles has decided to fully embrace social media as a way of engaging its customers. We like that they’ve decided to highlight those brand conversations by essentially allowing their official website to become the conversation. What we don’t like is how unprepared they seemed to be for the fact that maybe turning their entire site into a completely open and non-moderated Twitter feed might have invited some conversations centering around their product that could be deemed inappropriate in some circles.

Currently, the Skittles “homepage” takes you to the brand’s Facebook profile, which is a little more of a structured environment than Twitter, and gives them a little more control over the direction of the conversations.  It’ll be interesting to see if this is a long-term plan that will focus entirely on social media, or if it’s simply a stunt designed to do nothing more than attract a slew of attention to the brand.