A Look Inside

The internet has been all a-buzz with the recent move that made skittles.com a twitter search for “#skittles”. (Sorry friends it’s just their facebook page now). Many in social media and pr professions as well as others promoted this as a great idea, very cutting edge and a savvy use of social media.

Ridiculous.

Can we please all agree that it’s not just about buzz? Now don’t misunderstand me, if you can get people talking about your products, services or websites that’s a great thing. But it should never just be about talking. You want people to talk about you in a way that causes them to pay you for something or encourage others to do so.

There’s more bad here too. Sure lots of quality people were having good conversations about the move and about the brand, but the site itself was inundated with garbage, twitter spam, profanity and racial slurs. Go far enough back in the twitter search and you’ll see the mess.

Sure, a lot of us talked about skittles yesterday and today, but that’s probably all that happened: we talked. How many people do you know of that heard about the move? I’d venture to say quite a few, right? Now out of those people, how many mentioned that they picked up a bag of skittles? For me it was zero (and that’s out of a few dozen).

So this “campaign” was successful if the goal in it’s entirety was to get people to talk about skittles. The PR firm agency.com got paid to do what they were asked to do: create buzz. Good for them. I am left wondering, however, what the business case for this decision was (it exists somewhere right? tell me it does.), and if the campaign will meet those expectations.

How about this for a skittles campaign:

Give people a week to create a video featuring skittles and start announcing it a month in advance. It could be funny, dramatic, lame, who cares, the key element being it has to feature a bag of skittles. This would require anyone making a video to actually purchase a bag of skittles and that would contribute dollars to the bottom line. Have those video’s uploaded to YouTube and tagged with skittles, posted with links on twitter or submitted directly via the skittles.com website. Aggregate those videos to skittles.com and allow people to vote for the best for a prize. Any prize. One thousand dollars, an iPod, a one-year supply of skittles. Result: skittles gets paid…oh…and creates buzz.

In my imagination the campaign I just outlined would have done more for skittles sales in one week than they would normally do in a couple months. And it would have cost them a whole lot less. Unfortunately we’ll never know because all skittles wanted was to be talked about. Well, it worked, the echo chamber was buzzing.

Prove me wrong. Show me the sales numbers. Tell me how they did more than just create buzz. If this was a good idea, help me to understand how and why. I’ll never pretend to know and understand everything, I promise you that. Besides, if you think I feel strongly against it, go check out what Charlie O’Donnell had to say about it.

Geez, all this talk about skittles is making me hungry for sweets…I wonder if we have any M&M’s.