Web Biz Strategy

Warning: if you don’t know what Twitter is, this post will make no sense whatsoever, so please start here. All others please proceed!

This morning I went to Twitter.com and saw a lot of people asking about the www.Skittles.com homepage. I checked it out and found that Skittles had redirected all of their site traffic to www.skittles.com/chatter.htm, a page that is essentially the Twitter search results for the keyword “skittle.”

In other words,  if you post on Twitter using the word “Skittle,” your Tweet appears on the Skittles.com home page! Instant fame and/or notoriety!

Naturally I joined in,  I took the opportunity to announce this post and provide a link to my site.

This screenshot came from the Skittles.com site

Thanks Skittles! Don’t know if it helped you but I’ll take a free plug!

Not surprisingly, on the Skittles home page I saw: A) web pundits dissing the social media campaign, B) “Hi Mom” folks sending shout-outs, and C) everyone basically enjoying their 1-5 minutes of Skittles homepage fame. Oh, and profanities and comments about Skittles being made from stinky cheese.

What’s it all mean? Was this a hit or a miss?

Social media campaigns like this one need to be judged by the same standards that other advertising campaigns are judged by: return on investment (ROI), brand awareness, leads, and other measurable criteria. The marketing team at Skittles spent X amount of dollars on the campaign, and if they did their job right, they set measurable goals that will allow them to determine whether the campaign was successful or not.

I respect Skittles for their boldness but I don’t know how effective the campaign will be. There were two issues with the campaign that I’ll raise here.

1. “Adult” content. To get to the Skittles “Chatter” page, you have to give your birthday and age, which is a nuisance that nobody likes to do. The reason? To prevent younger visitors from seeing potentially objectionable user-generated content (UGC). I checked the site a few times today and saw profanity, so that is a potential issue for parents. I can imagine some parents not being pleased that their kids are seeing – or posting – profanity on the Skittles.com site. 

2. A Show vs. a Story. This is a marketing concern. During this year’s “recession Superbowl,” I and a number of others pointed out that a lot of the ads were all joke and no substance. You might laugh at them around the watercooler tomorrow but they didn’t connect you to the product or the brand.

Seth Godin wrote a piece about this where he compared a show to a story. The Superbowl advertisers put on a show, they didn’t tell a story that people could connect to. They may have generated some buzz but nothing of lasting value.

This may be the case with the Skittles campaign. Why should I eat Skittles today if I didn’t yesterday? I’d say the best thing that this campaign has going for it is that when people really do like Skittles, they “testify” on the home page for all to see. It’s real-time recommendations for Skittles, you just need to sort through the profanity and spam links.

Plus I have to give them credit for building buzz, they got about 550 words out of me today.

Here's one last screenshot from the Skittles home page linking to this post. Very meta!