Will short term buzz translate into long term sales for Skittles?

Last month the interweb was all a buzz about skittles.com who essentially gave up all control of their brand in favour of allowing consumers to define the brand attributes through flickr, youtube, facebook, wikipedia, and twitter. Read my post on it here.

Just as Google has made every page a homepage, Google now dictates what your brand means to consumers through its indexing of user generated content generated from blogs and other social media.

Comparing site traffic to skittles.com and some of its main competitors, it looks like they were able to spike ahead of even M&Ms in the month of March. Click on the chart to see a larger view.

It’s hard to argue against the enormous buzz and traffic generated through their bold social media strategy, but can they sustain it? Looking a the current traffic trend below, it looks like the buzz generated was short term, although if traffic settles above their longer term 50k monthly average, the site redo could still be called a success.

Although building awareness may have been the primary objective, driving purchase behavior (and gaining market share) will be the ultimate measuring stick.

If they can gain sustainable increase in market share by “giving up” control over their brand, it will be mark the beginning of a new era in marketing.

Having said that, my bet is that they can’t sustain traffic or improve market share without actually adding to the conversation online.

To date, all they’ve done is point you to other online sources. The true opportunity of social media is only realized when a two-way conversation between the brand and the consumer is created & sustained beyond an occasional PR stunt.