Skittles tried a new way of thinking recently, which stirred quite a few different reaction. Some were positive and some were negative, but most agreed that something different was being made available here.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about go check out www.skittles.com before you continue reading. I’ll go get a cup of coffee.

Back yet? Good. Anyway, as you’ve now seen there is virtually no site. Only the Contact page is an actual traditional website. The rest of site it aggregated from Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, Flickr and Youtube. When you click “Chatter”, you get the most recent tweets containing “skittles” and so on. Pretty novel idea, although not entirely original.

When the site launched a few days ago the front page was the Twitter feed. Now it’s the wiki-page, and this is probably because of the negative tweets on the whole project. Ironic really, but probably not a bad move. Right now tons of things are being written on twitter about this idea, so most of the tweets are sort of meta-tweets about the project, not Skittles.

The thing worth commending is the faith Skittles has put in people and the loss of control they’ve faced here. We often have to persuade clients to “loosen up”, when concerning social media, simply because they are afraid to receive negative reviews, bad press, what have you. The travel industry in particular are worried, because let’s face it, the pictures on Flickr are far more “real” than any brochure could ever be. The reviews on Tripadvisor are far more informing than any official blurb and so on. But this provides them with an amazing opportunity to improve on the areas people have issues with.

Back to Skittles. Will it work? Well, what are they trying to do? They’ve gained a lot of attention and I certainly appreciate the effort put in to the concept. Obviously now the chatter is about the project, not the product. So probably one of two things will happen: It will die out and become a one-hit-wonder – or it might well find an equilibrium in which tweets on Skittles are actually about the product. And let’s face it, Skittles are quite tasty…

I hope they gain a bit of momentum with and from it because it’s a bold move.