In case you haven’t seen it yet, you should check out the new site for Skittles (yes the candy…www.skittles.com).  It has generated an enormous amount of chatter and buzz online this week because they are doing some very interesting experimentation.  At the beginning of the week, the home page was, essentially, one big Twitter search for the term “Skittles.”  The entire page was really a  Twitter search page.  They had a small Skittles box with a nav bar on the top right corner of the page where you could link to other Skittles pages.  I just noticed that they just switched the page to their Facebook profile page.  I am sure this switch will generate another wave of online chatter.  It’s really fun stuff!

We have to commend Skittles for having the chutzpah to play with their main site like this.  It’s a fun experiment and something very interesting for those following the social media world.  But, is it working?  We’re very interesting in hearing what everyone thinks about it so far.

Certainly, it is generating an enormous amount of chatter and buzz.  I’ve received 5+ tweets about it in the past 2 days (and I’m not following that many people).  I’ve seen another 5 blog posts about it (and that’s just the tip of the iceberg, I’m sure).  And here I am writing a post about it myself.  While I don’t know how much traffic it has generated to the site, I would have to say that based on “buzz” as a metric, it seems to be working very well.  It’s an interesting phenomenon – they are using social media tools to generate buzz through social media networks.  Fun.

With that said, is this strategy working for the Skittles brand?  What image is it creating for Skittles?  Is it appealing to the right customers or is this just a “social media publicity stunt” that won’t drive sales or additional brand affinity?  No real way to tell at this point, but my gut says that this experimentation has helped secure a fun, free and wild image for the Skittles brand and that it will ultimately lead to sales.

Love to hear more thoughts, though.

DS

Tags: Buzz, facebook, Skittles, social media, twitter

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 4th, 2009 at 5:13 pm and is filed under MarCom 2.0, We Search, We Score, We Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.