trendpreneur

Taking the notion of a user-powered brand to a new level, Skittles has been the talk of the town today as its website changed to consist of a ‘new meeja’ web 2.0 box-ticking mashup. Well, not really a mashup so to speak; the basic homepage is a Twitter search, with links to the company’s Wikipedia, Youtube, Flickr and Facebook pages.

It’s great to see a company that’s selling a fairly old-school product start to jump on the social media bandwagon. Although it can easily backfire, with clued-in Twitterers posting ribald comments right left and centre, I’d guess that the social media traffic about Skittles for just today probably outweighs the whole of last year’s. After all, who tweets that they’re eating a packet of sweets? (Oh, wait.)

It looks like the end result of this is volume rather than quality of conversation. Everyone’s tastebuds are different, so a wave of people saying they don’t like Skittles (in fact, I don’t!) won’t really harm the overall perception of the product. The more dubious comments about cancer etc will mostly be taken with a pinch of salt, although the joy of the Internet is that even a side comment can explode into a meme and become entrenched; a tweet could, in theory, destroy Skittles (as the #skittlefisting tag is trying to).

What’s interesting to me is visualising the reaction to this change: looking at the proliferation of posts throughout the blogosphere, as well as the change in mood and tone of Skittles tweets over time. When did people start trying to game the system? When did (or will) they lose interest? How does the volume of chatter correlate with Facebook fan page subscriptions, YouTube views, Wikipedia edits? And how do these numbers relate to sales? Pretty cool to think about, especially as a case study. Apparently Omniture is providing analytics, so I’m especially keen to investigate what they deliver and where the gaps in their service are.