strategy

Marketers Praise Skittles' Gutsy Site Move

Skittles-social media

Many marketers are applauding Skittles's groundbreaking decision to turn its site into little more than a channel to point visitors to buzz and information about the brand on consumer-generated media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and Wikipedia.

Instead of corporate-produced content, visitors to skittles.com see one of these areas (the landing page is being rotated) with two overlays.

One overlay requires them to register their age and agree to terms of service stating that they are clicking into non-Skittles-controlled outside site content. The other is navigational. Clicking "chatter" takes visitors into Twitter and the thread of tweets about Skittles (bad words and all); clicking "media" takes them into Skittles videos and photos on YouTube and Flickr; and clicking "friends" takes them into the brand's Facebook area. Only the "products," "contact" and "other gobbledygook" (nutrition info) links connect into corporate brand content.

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Other sites--including music sites and one created for the agency Modernista!--have employed the concept of using the home page to redirect visitors to social media sites. But the consensus seems to be that this is the first consumer brand to go this route.

"Some will question whether it's wise to give up control on the Web--whether this is a good use of social media," says Charlene Li, author of business best-seller Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, consultant, speaker and blogger (altimeter.com). "But they are controlling content in the most important sense, which is that they're getting people to talk about and engage with the brand. It's hard to get people to engage with a candy, but this is generating incredible buzz and PR. This is a big brand pushing the envelope toward what a brand will be in the future."

"Skittles or any other brand has to be ready to accept the users' positive and negative comments, take their sentiments to heart and engage them in conversations that users are willing and excited to have," agrees Ben Weisman, digital strategist at Iris-New York.

Still, Weisman stresses that it makes sense that a brand like Skittles would be among the pioneers, since the Mars brand's image--daring, out-of-the-box, unicorn-riding, fantasy-meets-reality, rainbow-tasting"--creates a natural foundation for social media engagement.

"Skittles is basically saying, 'We get it. Whatever we can do cannot be as awesome as what you guys and girls can do, so we'll just link to it and let you do your thing,'" says mashable.com blogger Stan Schroeder. "We won't see all corporations do a complete social media makeover [à la Skittles] anytime soon, but we will see them give more and more importance to the various social channels out there."

Skittles has essentially turned its site into "a massive social media experiment," notes Chris Lake, editor in chief of eConsultancy. "It is possibly the bravest move I have yet seen, in terms of a global brand getting into bed with social media and social networks ... it appears to be an extension of the old adage about there being no such thing as bad PR," he observed. "Everybody is talking about it."

"CPGs have, by and large, been quite conservative about the Web in general and social media in particular, basically using them to extend their sites or to extend offline campaigns," points out Reggie Bradford, CEO of social media marketing and technology consultancy Vitrue. "More aggressive marketers are looking at controlling costs instead of controlling consumers. Skittles is to be applauded for going in this more aggressive direction."

2 comments about "Marketers Praise Skittles' Gutsy Site Move ".
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  1. Steve Pike from pikemarketing, March 3, 2009 at 4:58 p.m.

    Interesting? Yes. Bold and risky? No.
    Consider that Skittles page rank is about 400k versus M&Ms at about 40k. Mars is conducting a small scale experiment without much downside.

  2. Tom Becktold from Business Wire, March 3, 2009 at 5:35 p.m.

    Hmmm. Unfiltered content on a product that attracts kids. Don't think that's a good move. The tweet stream I saw was full of profanities. Not sure what the goal was for them other than to be social media bold for bold's sake.

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