I’ve seen a lot of emails, twitter messages, and blog posts today about the new skittles.com web site which is a portal to Skittles related content from twitter, flickr, youtube, facebook and wikipedia. Skittles has opened up their brand to be described by the people who want to talk about it. And with the new hype, that conversation is taking some odd turns.

There’s no point quoting the obvious stabs that some people are inflicting with the realisation that they can have their 15 minutes 2 seconds of fame on the Skittles “home page”, but other companies are taking the initiative to hijack the hype to spread word about themselves such as this tweet:

Skittles twitter hijack

And I’m all for limiting/stopping the marketing of junk food to kids but would you really expect to find a Date of Birth question visiting a confectionary web site and have to shield your kids from seeing the site for fear of what they might read (currently a couple of obsceneties per search page)?

Skittles and kids

I’m certain that after the initial rush the excitement will die down and the crude tweets will decrease. Maybe the Skittles Wikipedia page (which looks rather carefully crafted) will skip mass defacing … maybe.

Brave move, and I look forward to seeing how things progress. At the least they’ve suddenly got people talking about their little sweets, social media and user generated content.

A couple of more extensive pieces of commentary on the Skittles approach:

• Skittles Site Receives an Extreme Social Makeover by Stan Schroeder
• Taste the Monetisation by Mel Campbell

Tags: interaction, skittles, social media, twitter, user generated content, wikipedia

This entry was posted on Monday, March 2nd, 2009 at 10:52 pm and is filed under social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.