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by David Iwanow

on Mar 5

A closer look at the Twitter Skittles campaign

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Twitter seems to be the buzzword for most companies, and the real question many agencies are trying to answer is how can social media help grow our businesses or understand more about our customers. A very interesting campaign was recently launched by Agency.com and revolved around using the Twitter service to publish any tweets about the topic #skittles on their site.  

Suddenly it was your 15 minutes of fame, seeing your tweets up in lights for millions of potential visitors to view. This Twitter-powered campaign has only been running for a few days, but around 9pm (Brisbane time) it really started to ramp up among the Twitter community. The graph at the end of this post shows a massive lift in the number of topics of conversation that use the #skittles tag.  

This started to drop once some of the novelty factors wore off, but the second image shows some of the issues with leaving the gates open for people to take over your brand/site. Community sentiment was that it was an interesting concept, but spamming accounts were starting to move into the space.  

The question they kept tweeting about was: 'Is it a failure of social filters or a success for freedom of speech?'

@soup_media tweeted about how can they stop people writing crap and tagging it so it shows on skittles.com?

@PRsarahevans tweeted it was an interesting PR stunt, but questioned about the lack of a social filter

The background behind the site was initially discussed by Fred Aun from www.ClickZ.com, where Ryan Bowling of Skittles parent firm: MARS announced that Agency.com designed site as, "very different from anything else consumers are seeing", with an intention to encourage 'consumer chatter' and also 'certain beliefs about our brand'.

While companies have dismantled their traditional websites, with Kusbi Jeans, moving to Google Sites platform for their store, and Modernista sent users across to a number of sites such as Facebook, Google News and Wikipedia. It seems that this site is designed to be 'substantially' different according to Ryan Bowling, as it doesn't drive visitors away from its site but encourages engagement.  

To ensure that the new site doesn't violate MARS company policy and target users under the age of 12, you must enter your DOB. This little quirk also offers Skittles a wealth of demographic data as to who is visiting their site as everyone who wishes to enter the site must enter their DOB. This information is then stored in the visitor cookie and when you return you will not have to re-enter your DOB. This visitor information is more valuable than the actual campaign using Twitter to promote their site as they can using their web analytics package, Omniture, understand their visitors more than they ever could before.  

They can now understand that someone from Brisbane, will visit their site X number of times, and eventually looked at their range of flavours or chose to contact their company to find out more. So the question is, was the Twitter campaign setup for generating hype for their brand and to increase its awareness in the market or was it an exercise to create a place where using web analytics they could create a better understanding of who are the consumers who are engaging with their brand?

So how do you judge the campaign if you don't understand the brief, it may be a massive success if they were working to build their understanding of their visitors using Twitter as a honeypot, or it may be a failure if they expected to get quality engagement with their brands like YouTube?

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9 Comments

ZebraBites
  • Wrote on 6 Mar, at 04:26PM
Hi David

I loved this idea! But not sure about the analytics. Some questions;

Did you go have a look at the Skittles’ site?
Did you enter your real DOB?
Are you a marketer?
Are you on Twitter?

Not sure of just how useful the demographic data they collect from this exercise would actually be in terms of creating "...a better understanding of who are the consumers who are engaging with their brand”. Might get a bit of a skew!

Cheers
Katie
brettreasure
  • Wrote on 7 Mar, at 12:35AM
Agree with Katie, it's not about Market Research. It's an attempt to engage with users more broadly, building on the popularity of their FB account and a chance to attract attention to the brand (and agency) by being first at something. When big brands lead the way they generate mainstream media coverage and thats good PR. The buzz in the medium is the message.

Lots of Twitter users are self-promotion sluts (Im brettreasure on Twitter) so in the same way that bloggers attract attention by writing about whatever is hot on Google, Twitter users flock to whatever is the latest hash tag. The short term traffic will pass pretty quickly, but as David hints, the spam will not. That'll be an issue, as will moderating comments.

Will we see other brands handing their corporate image over to users? Youd be a brave man. My guess is that after the headlines, there will be headaches. But hats off; American market-leading brands continue to take risks and look for first mover advantage while Australian companies wait for proof that its safe.

Some intelligent commentary at Ad Age: http://adage.com/digitalnext/article?article_id=134995.
brettreasure
  • Wrote on 7 Mar, at 12:54AM
Update: it seems the original site had the Twitter feed as the home page but obscenities resulted in the company shifting it to a separate page...
thelostagency
  • Wrote on 8 Mar, at 08:44PM
Katie,

Thank you for the comments. I did spend a reasonable time on the site, but having a background in marketing and understanding about data capture I did not enter my correct DOB.

I am a user of twitter, you can follow me http://www.twitter.com/thelostagency, and that is how I found the campaign so interesting. I understand that they might get a data skew from a portion of their audience but since their Facebook profile gained 500,000 fans in 1 day, that amount of data would reduce the effect of the incorrect data collected.

If you visit the site now, you will notice that it is directed to their Wikipedia page, that has a section that talks about the results/issues with the campaign.

@brettreasure there is still discussion about was the campaign successful, I guess we will have to wait for Agency.com to make that case study
thelostagency
  • Wrote on 11 Mar, at 01:58PM
Skittles.com has gone through the following social media in this campaign
Twitter
Facebook
Wikipedia
Youtube "Transplant the Rainbow"
Flickr

The interesting thing is that the campaign has seemed to have lost some strength as its recent youtube clip "Transplant the Rainbow" had only 42 views at 1pm 11th March. Not the amazing figures that you would expect from such a large campaign.
ezsilver
  • Wrote on 4 Apr, at 03:34AM
There are definitely some pros and cons to such a concept. Some marketing gurus say any publicity (good or bad) has value. I wrote about some of those here http://blog.9thsphere.com/blog/social-networking-your-next-website.

In some circumstances it could provide a lot of value. So much so that, we were inspired by the idea and took it a step further at www.lume.me
obansaints100
  • Wrote on 13 Oct, at 01:33AM
Fad-tastic!

I can't imagine how this campaign generated anything except for the most basic of marketing benefit. "16 year old women prefer pink Skittles." Wow. I'm sure such a goldmine was worth having every middle-schooler with a PC writing 'WANKER" in all caps on the corporate homepage. The benefit, of course was showing how hip and with it MARS is to the all important tween and teen demographics.

You can't blame Skittles for jumping on the social media bandwagon (Come on, Everybody's doing it!) I just wish there were companies out there willing to do more of these silly attention grabs without hiding behind the business fig leaf of 'market research'. You're not going to learn all that much from opening your gates to absolutely everyone and quizzing them with no guarantee of legitamcy to their demographic data, so why not just be honest, and proclaim, 'we're in it for the publicity!'
obansaints100
  • Wrote on 13 Oct, at 01:34AM
Fad-tastic!

I can't imagine how this campaign generated anything except for the most basic of marketing benefit. "16 year old women prefer pink Skittles." Wow. I'm sure such a goldmine was worth having every middle-schooler with a PC writing 'WANKER" in all caps on the corporate homepage. The benefit, of course was showing how hip and with it MARS is to the all important tween and teen demographics.

You can't blame Skittles for jumping on the social media bandwagon (Come on, Everybody's doing it!) I just wish there were companies out there willing to do more of these silly attention grabs without hiding behind the business fig leaf of 'market research'. You're not going to learn all that much from opening your gates to absolutely everyone and quizzing them with no guarantee of legitamcy to their demographic data, so why not just be honest, and proclaim, 'we're in it for the publicity!'

Douglas Gregory
<A Href="http://www.promotionproducts.com.au/">Promotion Products</A>
SEO Company India
  • Wrote on 20 Jan, at 05:03PM
Thanks for the nice feedback everyone, I really appreciate it!

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