Skittles – Was it Really a Bad Move?

I awoke early on Monday morning, to see twitter alive with Skittles comments, posts and tweets crowding my screen. I knew something was going on, but didn’t bother to look until the hubbub had died down, at least a little.

Skittles CC on Flickr by Suwaif

In fact, it didn’t even cross my mind again until this afternoon, during a business meeting, where for the second time in as many weeks, I brought up something that the others hadn’t heard about, that I’d seen on Twitter or other social networking platforms. I honestly can’t remember what the first situation was – something silly that people were jumping all over and saying that the brand had made a poor move in its first social networking attempt, much like they were saying this week with Skittles.

There’s one thing that all of the people who are jumping up and down and pointing out the brand’s mistakes: we all talked about that brand, for the entire week that it did it’s social networking whatever. That’s gotta mean it’s working, at least a little, no?

Think about it. Would we even be talking about the rainbow coloured candies if they hadn’t chosen to feature Tweets mentioning the brand on their home page? Probably not, and yet, there’s a few self proclaimed pundits out there (no, I won’t link to them – they are in the crowd of those who annoy me and to whom I don’t want to offer more traffic to. You’ll find them if you look) who think that this was just a stunt to get people talking about their brand.

Sure, ok, fine. But it worked. We – everyone – talked about them. Just do a Google search for “Skittles + Twitter” and you’ll find more than 155,000 results.

Mashable said it best: Skittles is basically saying: “We get it. Whatever we can do cannot be as awesome as what you guys and girls can do, so we’ll just link to it and let you do your thing.” [source]

People might want to bitch and moan about the fact that this candy brand walked in and did this slightly…unorthodox form of corporate social networking, but the fact remains that they did something cool, brought it to their site, and engaged us. Are we’re all still talking about it. You gotta admit, that’s pretty cool, even if it’s not brand new and totally unique.

What has your brand done to get that many people talking about you – so much so that you garner more than 100 pages on Twitter Search? Think about that before you complain that the Skittles stunt sucked.