That was the question I set out to answer one day last week. Well, sort of anyway.
I’m sure most of you are well aware of the hullabaloo caused by the recent move made by Mars/Skittles that converted Skittles.com from a traditional web site to a mashup of social media sites, incorporating content from Facebook, wikipedia, YouTube and Twitter. The overall success of the social experiment has been debated widely; some seem to think it was brilliant, others feel it is ridiculous mistake to place control of a brand’s voice into the hands of the general public at large. Regardless of which camp you are in, all seem agree that it took considerable courage. Understandably, word of the new site spread like wildfire. Before long, nearly everyone on Twitter was sending messages with “#skittles” in them, just to see if they would show up on the site. I began seeing people comment in my “twitter stream” about what others had written just to get listed on the skittles page. I realized that people were not just looking for their own tweets, but were actually reading what others had written – score one for the skittles team.