Skittles The confectionary brand Skittles, owned by the Mars Corporation and famed for its ‘Taste the Rainbow’ advertising slogan has taken a giant leap forward online and embraced social media in a big way with the launch of its new and innovative social media campaign.
The Skittles Social Media Campaign
Skittle’s new social media campaign has taken over their entire website, www.skittles.com. The homepage has been replaced by a twitter feed, which is aggregating together all the tweets mentioning the Skittles brand. We couldn’t resist experimenting with our very own Propellernet tweet.
The Skittles Homepage
This mirrors the twitter experiment initially conducted on the econsultancy homepage a few weeks ago, which is still active, where econsultancy created a feed on their homepage which pulls in any tweets by econsultancy staff on twitter, or any tweets mentioning econsultancy.
The Econsultancy Twitter Experiment
The main difference between the two experiments being that the entire Skittles homepage has been entirely taken over by the twitter feed. Skittles have also taken this a step further and introduced a widget in the top corner of the site (see above) that links to further Skittles content located around the web (My only criticism is that it would be nice to easily move this widget as it covers up the content). The ‘Products’ tab links to the Skittles Wikipedia page, The ‘Media’ tab links to Skittle’s Flickr and YouTube pages and the ‘Friends’ tab links to, yep you guessed it, their facebook fan page.
Some may argue it’s a risky approach, allowing unmonitored User Generated Content (UGC) to appear freely on a brand’s website (Skittles do put a disclaimer upfront - see below). However I would argue that Skittles have been brave and found a great way to harness the power of social media and in my opinion, in doing so, have positioned themselves as a social media frontrunner.
Skittles Disclaimer
Yes spammers will abuse it, but judging by the econsultancy experiment and monitoring skittles.com today, this is likely to be relatively harmless and in low levels. I personally think it’s great to see a global brand like Skittles, who seemingly get social media, put themselves out there like this and take a risk.
It also demonstrates the power of social media. How did I found out about their campaign? On Twitter (Skittles are getting several tweets a minute)! And look at the brand buzz it has created for them… I’ve just blogged about it and I am sure there will be lots more people blogging about it over the upcoming days.
I say ‘hats off’ to Skittles! It’s refreshing to see global brands finally starting to embrace audiences online through social media.