This is my third social media post in a row which is very unusual for me, but it show how popular social media is becoming and how little certain people know about it.

I was wrapped up in the whole skittles.com, (i refuse to link to it, don’t want to give them the link benefit!) debate today on twitter and within about 2 mins i worked out a massive floor in the approach to the new skittles website.

For those of you who don’t know, (and can’t be arsed to look) what they have done is create a ‘new’ website (although this is a copy of Modernista) that pulls all it’s content in from Twitter whenever someone mentions ‘skittles’. I wouldn’t consider myself a genius but i spotted a similar thing to what i’m sure many of you have already thought about. Within in 2 mins of looking at the site i posted on Twitter something about the very simple possibility to spam the site and slate Skittles who had not built any control into their plan.

What was the objectives of this project? This was something i mentioned within twitter, it could be a brand exercise and the brand got a huge amount of mentions, spidered out across the net at a tremendous rate and more than likely generating a generous amount of links to the site. However with no content on the site it is unlikely to rank in the search engines for anything outside the brand terms.
It will more than likely be mentioned in a large percentage of the newspapers tomorrow resulting in free publicity for Skittles, but probably more so for Twitter which will benefit with a number of new users to ‘have some fun at Skittles expense’.

Will it sell more Skittles? Well the chances are people will remember the brand and when in the local news agent may just turn towards Skittles over M & M’s because they remember the press around this campaign. However they may also remember comments like:

‘You wouldn’t believe it, but skittles are remarkably healthy, if your goal is to get diabetes & possibly aids… #skittles’

‘skittles CUNT!’

This isn’t actually social media participation because Skittles aren’t actually interacting with the users on ‘their’ site. Skittles have no history of being a site that has participated in social media so this step is just a way to use social media to get people talking about them with absolutely no control over it or moderation. I would say the major target market of Skittles is the young children to early teen age group (correct me if i’m wrong) and they now have on their site things like ‘Skittles CUNT’ which i think is a very wrong thing to be showing a kid. I appreciate you have to put your age in when the site loads but any muppet can make up an age and i just went on it at 8.30 GMT and it didn’t ask me for my age so they’ve either turned that off or they are using specific hours to have it on. Which I’m sure could be an issues with website watchdogs.

This is another example of someone trying to get on the buzz of social media and failing. Yes it has received a lot of ‘buzz’ but it demeans the Skittles brand and will ultimately give them a bad reputation in future, especially with parents who don’t want their children to go onto a site plastered with spam and swearing.

What would i do if i were Skittles – I would change the site to an official Skittles site by the morning with content and sales messages on it. Possibly games and activities that meet their target market’s needs and then all the traffic they are currently benefiting from, and all the press they will get tomorrow will come to the ‘new’ site see how ‘cool’ and useful it is and continue to use it. Maybe this is the strategy, we’ll have to wait and see but if it isn’t then if I were Skittles i would be looking for a new agency preferably someone who knows what they are doing – Soup are a good agency