The idea was sweet but not sticky. The little colored candy Skittles launched a new home page today in which the regular site turned into a Twitter page, filled with all the references from the social network related to, you bet, Skittles. Tens of thousands of Twitter users began tweeting each other, "hey, did you see the Skittles' site?" And then their very text messages floated to the top of the "Skittles" web page. By early morning 0.9% of every 100,000 messages on Twitter included a mention of the candy.
Ah, but look at the downslope on the chart above -- faster than a sugar crash, the mentions began declining. Which makes us wonder if all this SEO link-baiting on the internet echo chamber, in which new schemes emerge to tempt people to talk about or link to a product, are really sustainable. Hershey's, we love you, but this game has now been played.
Update: MediaPost has the Skittles backstory here.
Update 2: We checked back on Day 2, and yes, Skittles' tweets had a sugar crash...
But as Dirk Singer notes, even 1 percent of a large number is a very large number. David Armano also shares a deep dive on the entire interactive strategy.
3 comments:
As you know I don't quite agree - I think it was a brilliant idea.
At least the concept of replacing your home page with your social networking feeds. On the implementation I do reckon they could have done better than to make a mass of 140 character tweets the first thing you see.
But ultimately, forgetting links and tweets, the proof is in the results they got today. 4000+ blog mentions as of this morning and 400 news pieces, including in A List media.
For a brand that never normally enters our consciousness that's pretty good going.
Is it sustainable? Interest will of course die down as we move onto something else.
But the model and case study is something people will be talking about for months to come, as whatever way you look at it, this is genuinely different.
I'm with Dirk here. They were in the Wall Street Journal (with a really positive quote from Charlene Li), the LA Times, and USA Today ... and literally thousands of blog mentions. What's not to like? Stickiness isn't the only desirable result.
Jon, agreed. My point wasn't that this campaign was bad -- it was a big success -- but rather to question whether this type of one-off buzz is sustainable.
A lot of these campaigns seek to get secondary mainstream media exposure (think Burger King's Facebook diss-a-friend), but after one shot, can't be replayed.
That's not a bad thing, but shows it's still problematic creating a sustainable model to use social media for ongoing marketing or advertising.
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