On February 27th, Skittles, the delightful fruity candy who has been entertaining audiences with their bizarre television ads for a few years, pushed the envelope further by redesigning their website. No flashy images, no fun games. In fact, they don’t really have any of their own content on the site.
Nope, if you go to skittles.com, you will see their Facebook fan page. (A week ago, you saw the search.twitter feed for “skittles”.) Click “media” and you end up on… YouTube. Chatter? Search.Twitter. Friends? Facebook. The only content Skittles is actually controlling on their site is the caloric information about Skittles. And why not? There’s only so much the company can say about pieces of candy… the rest is up to the consumer.
I saw an article in AdAge about this today:
“Skittles has unabashedly made the bold leap into accepting they can’t control the way their brand is defined in today’s social web and can only try their best to participate in the conversation. They’re taking the good with the bad, and I can assure you all that good is going to dramatically outweigh the bad.”
Skittles… ur doin it… rite, akshully.
Great results so far:
* Twitter: “Skittles” has been a trending topic on search.twitter since the unveiling of the new site. For a week, people have not stopped buzzing about the product. And personally, every time I see one of these posts, I know I get a Skittles craving.
* Facebook: 588,000 fans on Facebook. That’s HUGE. Not only that, but people are actually TALKING on the page via the wall and discussion board. They also have a fun game on the fan page that this girl is guilty of wasting a few minutes playing
So does this mean that we can look forward to our favorite brand’s websites becoming nothing more than feeds from social networks?
Probably not. AdAge agrees.
“I think the novelty will wear off for a lot of consumers. These people certainly want their social media and a big part of a brand’s focus will be on creating great quality websites that encourage discussion, communication and participation. The social-media aspects will be achieved by using the web services and integration tools of sites like Facebook. Deep integration with Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect will become more prevalent and brands with budgets will use all of these social features that Skittles has embraced. However, while social aspects will become more prevalent, brands will keep in mind that consumers also like their sites to be nicely packaged. Moving forward, businesses will create sites with a far higher level of aesthetic value and will work to make sure they retain the ability to at least control the brand visually.”
I’m sure we’ll see more companies incorporating, at the very least, links to their own social media presence. And many may even open up feeds to what others are saying about them online. But giving 100% of your content over to the consumers? Probably not. And they shouldn’t – it’s great to see what other people say about a brand, but it’s nice to see a professional web presence from that brand, too.
What are your thoughts on the Skittles website? Do you think opening up their brand reputation via their own website will pay off in the end?
