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.

With the immense prevalence of Twitter apps, hacks and mashups out there, the concept of a new idea is fast becoming a fallacy. However, I have a problem, and I’ve not yet found a handy solution.

This particular problem, as alluded to here and with various Tweets I’ve sent, is one of catching up. Before the anti-Twitter brigade get going, let’s be clear here: this isn’t just a Twitter-related problem. I subscribe to users on FriendFeed who post items there, and 95% of my Facebook friends post everything on Facebook; I’ve also got a (long unused) set of Livejournal contacts who routinely post interesting stuff, not to mention the number of blogs and del.icio.us feeds I subscribe to and don’t bother reading.

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Warning! This post is going in a slightly different direction than envisaged.

I originally loaded up Wordpress, opened Facebook in a new tab and was about to unlink my Twitter status from my Facebook updates. I felt I was spamming Facebook too much, that fear of spamming ‘real’ friends was conflicting with the desire to connect with people using @replies on Twitter, and that I would be able to talk more freely on Twitter as a result.

For example, if I start evangelising about social media and my business on Twitter, I don’t really think my school friends need to see it. Most Facebook status updates are for socialising – “I’m tired” prompts “hugs” in reply – not self promotion.

However, this all changed in the minute it took me to log into Facebook and browse some recent updates. I posted a tweet commenting that I’m looking for paid writing work (economic crisis, don’tchaknow) and someone gets back to me within five minutes after seeing the tweet appear on Facebook.

Guess I won’t decouple my social identities after all. I’ll just have to keep thinking before I write, which sometimes defeats the object with these platforms.