You built the Skittles.com website
I am so excited about the new Skittles.com website. If you haven't seen it yet, go give it a try. You will see something completely different and certainly a model for websites to come. Skittles recognizes that, as Six Apart says, "The biggest online social network is the internet itself". In essence, there is no Skittles website. All the content is user generated on other websites. A small floating box serves as the website's navigation. The homepage loads the Wikipedia pages for Skittles. Click to read about different Skittles products, and the product specific Wikipedia page loads. Click on Videos and the Skittles channel on YouTube loads. Click on Pictures and Flickr loads. Who knew so many people were taking photos of Skittles? Click on Chatter and you get a Twitter feed. Lastly, click on Friends and the Skittles Facebook page loads. Pure genius.
It is not all rainbows and candy though. By simply loading a twitter feed, Skittles has given up complete control of the content. There are negative remarks about the brand, and even worse, racial slurs and "bad" language. I suppose that explains the annoying feature requiring you to enter your birthday upon first visiting the site. Because of this, some people are calling the campaign a disaster. I am not so sure. I am a strong believer in transparency with a brand. If you offer a truly good product or service, good comments will outweigh the bad. Reputations are not likely to be ruined by a few juvenile posts. Beyond that, there is the old adage, "Any PR is good PR." Just look at their Facebook page. They have over 500,000 fans. I doubt many people even knew about the Facebook page before this site launched.
For the past week, I have been trying to help the band Noba get started with all the social networks. The website, which is due for a re-design, is almost a second thought. Most people look for them on websites like Facebook, Last.fm, iTunes, and MySpace. Instead of building them a website with links sending their visitors to varying different locations, why not build a site based on the Skittles.com idea? I think it could work great for musicians.
What do you think? Do you see this model working for other businesses?
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I just thought - this could be great for restaurants too - load Citysearch for review, Google Maps, Menu Pages, Open Table, Flickr...
I think you're onto something much better than what Skittles is doing. With a band there's a natural way to use the social networks to interact with them. You can become a fan, listen to music, see where the band is playing, watch videos, etc. The musical experience can be very social anyway.
By contrast, the experience of buying & eating candy isn't very social and doesn't particularly lend itself to social media. I applaud their willingness to enable a brand hijack, but I wonder if it will truly influence the market.
Thanks Garry. My thoughts exactly. I am actually working on a band website with the social networking aspect tie in right now. We are handling it a little differently than the Skittles site and adding a new and exciting interactive element. I will sure to post the case study when it is launched.