YouthBuzz™ Blog

Update: Skittles Forwarding to Wikipedia

This is going to be an unusually short post (as it’s nearly midnight and youth marketers need their beauty sleep, too), but I wanted to note that Skittles is now forwarding to Wikipedia.  For those keeping score, that means Skittles’ homepage on Tuesday was Twitter, Wednesday was Facebook, and Thursday is devoted to Wikipedia.  (One can only guess that YouTube is on tap for Friday.)  I think this confirms that yesterday’s move by Skittles to redirect their website to Facebook was not, as some claimed, a response to the occasional foul language that appeared on the Twitter feed, but a calculated decision to ride the buzz wave.  (It remains to be seen if pointing their homepage towards Wikipedia is good enough for another day of news.)  I said it yesterday, and I’ll say it again: I think this represents a bold and well-executed embrace of social media by Skittles.  Will it reap long-lasting benefits?  No, not necessarily.  But it certainly got us talking.  Just do a Google Blog search for “skittles” and you’ll see what I mean.

(While we’re on the topic of Google searches, I would also suggest doing a Google News search for coverage of the Skittles campaign.  I was surprised to find that “traditional media” was really quiet on the topic.  There were a few articles — one in The Wall Street Journal, for instance — but they essentially stopped paying attention after the Twitter-linked version of the site went live.  This is definitely one of those stories where blogs are hands-down doing it best.  I haven’t found a single “real” news story mentioning the move by Skittles from Facebook to Wikipedia.)

For those of you who are just stumbling upon this now, check out our posts about the Skittles social media campaign from Tuesday and Wednesday which provide background and (in our humble opinion) some analysis worth reading about the implications for youth marketing and the Gen-Y set.  Oh, and as always, let us know what you think about this new development.  You’re going right now to write on Skittles’ Wikipedia page, aren’t you?