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skittles.com – boldly going where ever consumer brand should

by Phil Barrett

This morning my twitter feed was buzzing about the new skittles.com website. This is especially topical for me as my new role at BSTREET means I’ll be spending a lot of time building, evolving, and planning with some really cool consumer brands.

 

One of my first assignments – how do effectively integrate social media into a brand site? Looking historically, we’ve taken a highly interactive / flash approach to building online experiences. The team I’ve inherited is very talented with flash… so how do we bridge to social media?

One very bold approach is what skittles.com has done. They’ve made a twitter search result page on “skittles” their default homepage with a small widget floating on top. The neat thing about twitter search – all the social media buzz is captured about their brand and their new campaign – for better or worse.

Instead of building out a site to support their product, they have leveraged content that already exists across the web. This includes wikipedia for product info (which anybody can edit), flickr for product images, YouTube (that they branded) for product videos, and facebook for ‘friends’ of the product.

Bonus points for building a mobile web enabled experience too!

Good on them for going all the way with this execution – now the question becomes, how do they maintain it? Do they skip the “cold start” of social media initiatives because user generated content is already rich? 

I’m looking forward to tracking where they go next.

  • Hey Phil, I agree. I love the idea, it will be very interesting to see how they proceed from here and how other brands be able to learn what happened with skittles to create more integrated brand experiences.
  • most of the negative feedback i've read have related to either the fact that this idea has been tried before ( Modernista!’s site) or that shame on skittles for losing all control of their brand with twitter defaulting as their start page.

    Unlike the other social media links, they have no control over what is being said... which i think is an intial ploy just to generate a ton of buzz (which they are)

    Per their statement, they may change the landing page as things evolve, and i wouldn't be surprised if they do.

    Having said all that, i still love the idea - although agreed that there was more they could have done to make this an integrated brand experience. For example, why not use the twitter API to stream into a branded page with filters pre-set... or create a social media dashboard a la netvibes?

    Per my initial comments, i'm most interested in what's next... how can they maintain the buzz?
  • Actually it also got slammed quite badly... have a look at this: http://www.i-boy.com/weblog/
  • Phil,
    Good call! I really liked the way they incorporated all the new tech to create their site. Though they should be careful as the "Shittles..taste your asshole" section popped up in the middle of the screen when I went to the twitter section! Almost as funny as their commercial.
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