Was it a good move for media mogul Rupert Murdoch to set up (or get one of his lackies to set up) his first Twitter account on New Year’s Eve? And, in the light of what happened next, is Twitter thorough enough in verifying that celebrities’ Twitter accounts really belong to them?     The saga started when Murdoch sent his first few tweets from… Read more…

8 great rules to remember! Marketing has made a substantial leap since social media became common place; giving consumers the tools to easily share and engage with each other to become a global powerful voice 24/7. What’s being said about your company? Is it good, is it bad? How do you find out and how can you get involved? Because the chances are, the consumer… Read more…

Here’s a great new infographic demonstrating some useful analysis of Twitter and Facebook. The best time to tweet to reach your biggest audience is 5 pm on a week day, and surprise surprise, if you are using Facebook midday on Saturday is optimum visibility time. I like this as it underlines social media strategy across these two platforms as very different, and to my mind… Read more…

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

I don’t write much on social media marketing even though i do a lot of it. I find social media marketing strategies vary heavily dependent on your objects so one channel can be hugely successful for one product and have no effect for another but i’ve really started to get into Twitter lately and have seen a huge benefit out of using it. Not only does it have a very large SEO community to bounce ideas between but it is also a great way to mass target specific articles or content i have written.

I wrote a story on Facebook SEO links quite a while back now and knew it would be a useful post to the SEO community so i have pushed it through blog comments and social bookmark sites and generated a decent amount of traffic out of it. However it is nothing compared to what i got out of it when it got picked up on Twitter. Someone on Twitter posted a link to the story and it then got retweeted by a couple of other people, resulting in a huge peak in traffic to the site.

By writing useful content and posting a link to it on Twitter, as well as referencing the relevant group can result in more traffic than from the major search engines. So for the people that are still wondering why there is a lot of discussion around why Twitter could be the next Google there is your answer!