Skittles site redesign puts Twitter, social media at the forefront [UPDATED]

The new Skittles.com, with a few pranksters chiming in.

Skittles redesigned its website Sunday to show an unfiltered look at the online social consciousness relating to the brand. Surprise, surprise, pranksters showed up.

The updated website is little more than a small overlay that links to user-submitted information about the candy on various social media sites: photos of candy wrappers on Flickr, videos from the company's YouTube channel, the Facebook fan page, its Wikipedia entry and real-time conversation on Twitter.

Upon loading Skittles.com, the visitor is asked to enter a date of birth as an agreement to the no-holds-barred information flow. A Twitter search for "skittles" is the default landing page, displayed in the background.

Putting the micro-blogging website at the forefront has apparently paid off. "Skittles" has topped Twitter's list of trending topics since last night. It has spurred discussions about ...

... the candy -- about the fresh marketing idea and, from overeager folks looking for their 15 seconds of fame, about nothing much at all. (Hi, Mom! I'm on Skittles.com.)

It also attracted the online riffraff. Tweets have been flowing in throughout the day of a racy, profane or off-putting nature. Other people have posted on completely unrelated topics, usually peddling some website or brand, followed by the term "#skittles" so it shows up in the tweet stream. Thanks for the free advertising, Mars Corp., they seemed to say.

"Skittles, or any other brand, has to be ready to accept the users' positive and negative comments," Ben Weisman, a marketing expert for the Iris agency, said in a statement. "It's a simple execution, nothing groundbreaking, but it's bringing together platforms and users in direct engagement that's positive for the brand."

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone (@biz) agrees that the final product isn't as innovative as it could be. "The implementation could be done in a more elegant way using our APIs," Stone said in an e-mail, referring to the tools Twitter makes available to outside programmers. "We'll get in touch with them and hopefully make some improvements."

Twitter users expressed concern that the new Skittles.com was to blame for today's shoddy Twitter performance. "There was some technical degradation on the site today but it was unrelated," Stone said in an e-mail. "The Skittles project doesn't slow Twitter down in any way."

The Skittles-related tweets are still flying. You can see a list of the colorful messages, organized by user authority, on the Twithority search engine.

Corrected, 8:54 a.m.: A previous version of this post identified Iris as the marketing agency behind the Skittles website redesign. Iris was not involved in the redesign, which was handled by Agency.com.

-- Mark Milian [follow]

Comments

[Kwame Banks]

actually, i think agency.com redesigned the site - not iris

[Henry]

Nice touch with "follow" link, Mark :)

[Mark Milian]

Thanks, Henry, for calling out my shameless plug! ha

[Bruce]

Seems to me that the economy has gotten to Skittles. It's fine to link to other sites but I think people expect more from a corporate site. It's a far cry from the Skittles of the past when they had apps that let people build their own casual games and other orginial content. Article at http://digadvisors.com/skittles-drops-website-for-collection-of-social-network-pages/ .

[cybele]

The website did not launch on Sunday, March 1st. I believe it was at least Feb 26th (I saw it first on the 27th.)

Since then the Wikipedia page has undergone a huge cleanup, which is probably a good thing. But the circular reference on the WIkipedia page to the Skittle site is a bit odd.

The new "site" fits well with Skittle overall, strange advertising approach. But still, I like a bit of information from my official website for a product. Like product information.

[cybele]

Skittles.com's has three major components missing as of today: their Flickr account, Facebook account & YouTube account are no longer available.

http://skittles.com/site_map.htm

[Jack Leblond]

This would have gone much more smoothly for them if they had participated in the conversation. They also should have made sure they secured the brand name on the various sites first too - then there wouldn't be a cute kitten tweeting as "skittles".