Skittles.com... A Massive Social Media Experiment

Skittles's has turned it's website into little more than a channel to point visitors to buzz and information about the brand on consumer-generated media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and Wikipedia. Instead of corporate-produced content, visitors to skittles.com see one of these areas (the landing page is being rotated) with two overlays.

One overlay requires them to register their age and agree to terms of service stating that they are clicking into non-Skittles-controlled outside site content. The other is navigational. Clicking "chatter" takes visitors into Twitter and the thread of tweets about Skittles (bad words and all); clicking "media" takes them into Skittles videos and photos on YouTube and Flickr; and clicking "friends" takes them into the brand's Facebook area. Only the "products," "contact" and "other gobbledygook" (nutrition info) links connect into corporate brand content.

Other brands have employed the concept of using the home page to redirect visitors to social media sites. But the consensus seems to be that this is the first consumer brand to go this route.

Some question whether it's wise to give up control on the web -- whether this is a good use of social media, but Skittles is controlling content in the most important sense, which is that they're getting people to talk about and engage with the brand. It's hard to get people to engage with a candy, but this is generating incredible buzz and PR. This is a big brand pushing the envelope toward what a brand will be in the future. 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.