Positive buzz was moving around yesterday about the Skittles website taking on the social media genre quite nicely. Not even a day later they move the homepage to the static Facebook group page due to negative chatter about skittles on Twitter. So the big question I am asking is:
a) were they smart enough to predict some negativity & change it to Facebook with the aim of getting more press. Sorry, but negative press is good press if they handle it correctly OR;
b) were they simply not competent enough to predict that there will always be some bad with the good...
I honestly can't believe it is the first, because all brands know that putting your brand out into the communities, will always erupt some bad chatter also. Its the strategy you have in place to counter act the bad - support it & grasp it! "we all know that not everyone out there loves our brands" - and that's fine! Interesting to see how they counter act & comment on this... Either way they got bucket loads of press out of it as they are the 3rd top word used in Twitter two days in a row! Yep, beating politics, world news and so on in Twitter...
Good job guys - at least for trying... Not necessarily award winning material but not bad either!
Good job? Really? When I looked it was 50% spam for a free laptop, and the rest was abuse with the #skittles tag. I struggle to see how that builds a brand. You argue 'PR', but while our industry might find it an interesting experiment and spend a day chatting about it, somehow I doubt it even registered with the man in the pub. If I was the client I wouldn't see that as particularly wise use of a marketing budget. All IMHO of course.
As far as budget goes, I would hope this didn't rack up to many dollars... No need for it... Just integration requirements & some potential partnership deals with FB etc... - depends which way they went about doing it!
Looking back there now yes, there is negativity but also lots of positivity. People are linking to their brand and talking about their brand everywhere - at least online! So from a linking perspective, good job & I am still OK to say that I think they've done a good job of building some hype - even if there is BS in there and some negative feedback...
As far as capturing the attention of the guy in the pub, not the target audience really & people are still chatting a little about it. I personally would like to see some results and measurements at the end as to how they are measuring success - various avenues into this one & yes, its not impressions and bloody clicks!
So for a web presence - 100 times better than some "campaign site with pretty pictures and animations and games", reaching their target market of kids - not bad... Could look at other social genres also & the fact they are rotating to different homepages, seems this may have been in the plan!
Anyway, all interesting to watch as far as I am concerned - brands do have to think how they can take their online image away from the traditional sites & for budget, well as I said... this shouldn't have costed much and it has global reach...
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Michael Trenerry
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Member since: 03 Jun 2008
Last login: 29 Oct 2009
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