Skittles Wants to Be Your Friend.
Posted in Youth Culture Research on March 4th, 2009
Another day, another development in the much-discussed Skittles campaign put together by the globe-spanning Agency.com. (For those of you who need to get up to speed, check out yesterday’s post which details its roots.) Today, when I directed my web browser towards www.skittles.com, I was expecting to see the Twitter feed that has garnered so much attention. Instead, gone was the Twitter feed, and in its place appears Skittles’ Facebook fan page. 
Some have suggested that this redirection towards Facebook was a result of some nasty comments that found their way into the Twitter stream. Other marketing wisemen and wisewoman (YMC included) see this as a well-timed move to keep the buzz machine rolling. Remaking your homepage in the form of a Twitter stream is innovative, but the shock value is short lived. By transforming the campaign just a few days in, Skittles is maximizing the media attention. If they made the change three weeks from now, once everyone (and their marketing-savy mother) had heard about the campaign, we would all respond with a collective shrug. Oh, neat. But by making a radical shift in the middle of the media frenzy, they guarantee another round of articles and blog posts (not unlike this one) calling out the campaign and sparking new discussion. And even the dissent, and their has been a fair amount of it bubbling up around the blogs, is ultimately a win. People (just like us) are engaging in a lively chat — and Skittles is undeniably at the center of it.
It’s worth mentioning a word about the implications of the Facebook specific strategy, as well. As of this writing, the Skittles fan page has 588,466 Facebook users that have signed up to be “fans” of the brand. Just like that, Skittles has half a million (likely majority Gen-Y) Facebookers, which they can reach out to in a number of interesting ways. A few months from now, I would not be surprised to see Skittles leverage that fan group to create some attention-getting digital campaigns that allow users to interact with the brand. (Think along the lines of Burger King’s Facebook campaign.)
And, mark my words, that fan page is going to be three times larger before this story has died down. Because remember: every time a Facebook user joins the fan page, their decision to join that group is reported in their “News Feed.” While this may sound insignificant to those who don’t live this stuff everyday, the implications are huge. Presence in their personal News Feed means that all of their friends have a chance to see that they’ve joined, and many will, at the very least, check it out for themselves. This is why Facebook is so powerful. It combines the viral power of the internet with what is essentially peer-to-peer marketing.
What are your thoughts on the new developments? I think I’m going to go grab a bag of some delicious rainbow-colored candy.
