With brands flocking to Twitter, there are many that still need to take
the time to understand how it can work for them. In a recent post about
the evolution of brand conversations, our own David Feldt describes how much work it takes to engage in meaningful conversations with customers.This morning, Skittles is letting you do the work for them. Instead of guiding the conversation, they've handed it over. The site's homepage it pulls in every -- absolutely no editing -- twitter reference to the name "skittles." They've added Twitter to their social media repertoire without ever tweeting a character themselves. Their new website may be generating quite a bit of buzz, but at what cost?
Here's what folks around our network are saying:"The Skittles' twitter homepage "strategy" makes NO sense whatsoever and adds nothing to the Skittles brand. All they did was put up an unfiltered, generic Twitter search page that is open to all kinds of abuse. If they had put some thought into it they could have done something worthwhile that actually tied to the Skittles' customer base and made sense."
-David Feldt, SVP, Managing Director
"More than just the Twitter feed, the "Media" link is their YouTube channel and the "Friends" link is their Face book page. Another argument for the "do brands really need a .com anymore" thesis."
-Craig Ritchie, Strategy
"Interesting and not unexpected from a brand known for some extreme marketing ;)"
-Jay Bain, Project Management
"Fail or no fail. I have to say I'm hankering for some Skittles right about now. Maybe that's the point."
-Sandy Marsh, Experience Architecture
"There's no such thing as bad press, as long as they spell your name right."
-David Freeman, Technology
"Skittles has taken the "you are what they say you are" adage literally which is not a bad approach or a new one - Jeep Experience was a similar strategy. But the execution lacks. When a consumer arrives at your brand page they should get a sense for what the brand is about. A handful of 140 character blurbs conveys a scattered and convoluted message. It might have been more interesting to bubble up key phrases or terms from the multitude of skittles tweets or draw in imagery from Flickr."
-Russ Hopkinson, Strategy
How long before skittles revokes their campaign? Check it out and tell us what you think. And if you twitter it, please include that too.
UPDATE 3/3/09: Skittles has moved their Twitter feed to a less prominent page titled "CHATTER" and replaced the home page with their Facebook page -- content they are controlling. Skittish or part of their long-term strategy?
Sarah Jo Sautter
Strategists & Planners
Comments (10)
My first reaction was 'great idea and use of social media', but I am admiring it less now because it seems to be an almost total copycat imitation of Modernista.com's site design:
http://konigi.com/design/modernista
by Agency.com. One thinks they could have put some original thinking into the user experience. Hopefully they didn't charge the client too much for the design of the site! I'm sure the 'underdesign' is part of the strategy...
I also don't like that I can see profanity on the page behind the age gate overlay. Not cool for kids...
Anyway, here's one of the weird Skittles ads that I was talking about:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsEYqFQZoQA
Posted on March 2, 2009 13:04
The experience is actually the same on a Mac as it is on a PC.
Posted on March 2, 2009 13:17
Pure laziness.
Posted on March 2, 2009 14:49
Yes, it's easy. But easy is not the same as lazy. It's not easy to get execs to try something this bold.
But bold is also sometimes stupid. Stupidity you can see when you read their home page hijacked with junior high humor um, trashing the rainbow.
Does stupidity work? Ask Borat, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog and Jack Tripper.
Is that right for Skittles? I don't know. But in the time it took to write this response there are 50 new tweets with the word Skittles.
Posted on March 2, 2009 23:03
twitter is definetly an excellent feature ...but i dnt see an importance to place it on the home page with full screen
Posted on March 3, 2009 01:10
Gudipudi, good point. Maybe they could have used 1/2 that real estate and the other 1/2 to put some context around it.
Jeremy, I'm on a Mac (Firefox 3.0) and I'm still seeing the wikipedia page. hmmmm.?. But this is basically what they're serving up to everybody else: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=Skittles
Posted on March 3, 2009 06:33
Honestly I think the bigger blunder that I don't hear as much about, is requiring a birthdate to enter.
Posted on March 3, 2009 11:24
It’s almost as though all these social media campaigns are more geared toward hiring a hip and savvy agency. How do these agencies pitch? “Dudes, we’re like ‘on the in’ online; a brand like you has to be hanging with cool kids like us.”?
I mean, what’s it going to do for their sales? An initial incremental boost? And if so, will that incremental boost cover the cost of the agency fees for this campaign? I somehow doubt it.
But what do I know? I'm just some douche-bag video blogger... :P
Posted on March 3, 2009 12:30
Jay nailed it. Transparency was an interesting angle for Modernista when they launched it A YEAR AGO, considering their service offering: http://bitly.com/FLVoj
But Skittles? C'mon. Even if this was remotely on strategy, twitter is a misguided executional element: most consumers really don't want to have a conversation with multi-colored candy.
Posted on March 5, 2009 04:05
Bold, not Lazy!
I'm taking the contrarian view on this topic. I think there is more to this than meets the eye. I currently disagree (time will tell) with the notion that this is a misguided mistake. Why? It's too soon! There hasn't been a peep from agency.com/Mars re: the goals & objectives of this program. We really don't know what they were trying to accomplish, so every opinion/theory/evaluation of this effort is being done through the wrong lens.
Once that information begins to leak out to us, we can then accurately assess the viability of their thinking and execution.
A few other comments...
The rotation from Twitter to Facebook to Wikipedia to what else appears to be part of their original strategy.
Any brand that executes a user generated content project is going to get both the positive and negative, agency.com and Mars know this, and will have anticipated it. It isn't reason enough to say they shouldn't have done it (although one can argue for profanity scrubbing).
And, one thing that agency.com/Mars are doing well is listening. They are listening to ALL of the conversation on this topic, and reaching out to people privately. They may not be acknowledging it publicly, but there is a lot of back channel communication going on.
In summary, my point is the outcome is still up in the air. Let's all take a deep breath and wait for the facts before we put Skittles at the stake and burn em.
Posted on March 5, 2009 13:38