The Skittles social-media-ification experiment
I knew about the Skittles website redesign and social media campaign through Joe Solomon, who alerted me on Saturday about it. Quite frankly, I didn’t think much about it. I *love* consuming Skittles (they remind me of good times during my Masters’ degree) and simply thought “oh what a cool idea”. That was the end of that.
Today (Monday) I woke up to some blog posts and tweets not liking what the PR people in Skittles did (try to make the site more social-media-like by including a Twitter search when clicking on ‘Chatter’, Flickr for photos, etc.). I am not in the PR business, but I always praise organizations that jump on the social media bandwagon for at least trying. That’s what I tweeted earlier – that I didn’t understand the backlash about the Skittles social media campaign. Even Ian Capstick (whose ideas I like quite a lot) didn’t like the site (as indicated on his blog).
For the naysayers, I’d like to say – how about phrasing your writing in such a way that when the Skittles social media monitors and finds them, they can learn about what they did wrong? Admittedly, as Ian indicates, the Skittles insertion of a Summize search stream doesn’t add much value. I agree. Conversation and bi-directional interaction are key, I’ve said so before. I am not sure the PR team for Skittles has trained enough in social media to understand this. But I’m guessing (and this is just a guess) they are getting there.
For the time being, as Steve Jagger indicated, people are talking about them, and as Shane Gibson mentioned, the early adopters may be trying to dictate rules as to how social media should be done. If that’s the case, then the social media gurus should be providing advice to Skittles RIGHT NOW on what needs to be changed. The truth is, they are achieving things that I’m sure they were trying to achieve (get people to talk about them). Below are two graphs that show the TwitScoop searches for Skittles: As you can see, lots of attention in the last three days.
I don’t foresee the same backlash with Skittles than Motrin had a few months ago, so let’s see where this goes. On my part, I’m quite interested in monitoring what comes out of this.
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I have to say that this move by Skittles is relatively remarkable (not many big brands are trying this,) but still not all that outstanding. Sure the twitterverse is talking about Skittles, and maybe their only goal was to get attention, positive or negative. Like you say, though, social media is about interaction and as far as I can tell no one at Skittles is interacting. They’re just utilizing SM to generate buzz. Not necessarily a bad thing, but doesn’t quite get to the heart of what SM can do. It’s old-school PR falling short of the capability of SM.
I knew it was worth interrupting your class!
twitter is definetly an excellent feature …but i dnt see an importance to place it on the home page with full screen
skittle has taken an outstanding move, by giving the total control on the real time conversations
Hey Raul,
I like your take on the skittles story, but from my agency experience and working with the large corps, am 99% sure that the enlisted a social media expert to help them with the campaign. I can’t speak to whether they are good at their job or not. The companies and agencies that I have been meeting over the last nine months get it. Most of them now are well aware that if they don’t enlist the help of an expert there could be some heavy collateral damage to their brand. Motrin may be one exception.
I wrote about it as well on my blog: http://www.powershiftermedia.com/blog
JP’s last blog post..#skittles a Not so Colourful Social Media Campaign