Skittles New Home Page

There has been a lot of buzz around the Skittles campaign that started on Feb 27th.  Basically, Skittles replaced their home page with a navigation unit that links visitors to user generated content that includes the word “Skittles” on Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr.  Fans of Skittles can visit the Skittles home page to see what the Soc Net universe is saying about Skittles.

The initial response to this campaign was a huge spike in traffic — Hitwise reports a 1332% increase in web visitors on March 3rd.  But the novality seems to have worn off.  Searched for the keyword “Skittles” spiked for a day then started to come back down to their average numbers.

Searches for "Skittles" over the last 12 months

The genius of this campaign is that people will now go out of their way to write something on these SocNet sites about Skittles.  Then they will go to the Skittles home page to see if what they wrote shows up.  This is GENIUS!!! They made a campaign that turns their fans into self-fulfilling celebrities for 5 seconds.  Let that sink in — if you can figure out how to do that you’ve got a successful campaign.

Thoughts:

• Skittles insights that drove this campaign must have included that their core consumer is heavily engaged in Social Networking.  That 18 to 25 target is my guess.  This doesn’t work for kids.
• They took a very bold position here — they gave their home page over to the people.  Not just fans but to anyone that posts anything about Skittles.  For better or worse.  For instance, there was a post the “Skittles causes cancer” that showed up on the Skittles home page.  For all those companies out there scared to death of what people will say about their brand take note — user generated content is not to be taken that seriously.
• The big take away is that this campaign creates a platform for fans of the brand to broadcast their fandom to each other.  In such away that makes the fan feel that they have tapped into an audience — making them a micro-celebrity for the second their post is on top of the Skittles page.
• This campaign is also a great example of the expected longevity of SocNet campaigns.  The nature of this space is that it moves fast — don’t expect these types of things to be sustainable.

According to an article from InternetNews Dell has generated over $1MM in the last 18 months by posting sales and promotional messages out to their Twitter followers.  The Dell Home Outlet currently has over 3000 followers.  Although $1MM is not a huge amount for Dell the example does show that the Twitter audience is somewhat in the buyer mind set.

This is a pretty standard use of Twitter in these early days of the service.  Companies are creating Twitter accounts to push product information, special offers, or customer service updates.  Once Twitter determines a business model I’m sure there will be additional opportunties for marketers to leverage this micro-blogging technology.