Skittles “taste the rainbow” candies have been a personal favorite for quite some time. Skittles might be the only non-chocolate candy I actually appreciate. Skittles recently took a huge leap over the rainbow hoping to find their “pot of gold” (more customers) by redesigning their website and online marketing strategy. Skittles.com is now a social media portal.
As you can see if you check out the site, Skittles only has two real pages – Contact and Products – the remaining pages are direct links to their Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Wikipedia pages. Essentially, Skittles is letting the consumer do its marketing for them. It is a high risk – unknown reward strategy that I think will not produce the results Skittles is hoping for, thus I say it is a bad social media strategy.
Skittles does not filter any of the comments, tweets, posts or updates on any of their channels, thus there is a fair amount of inappropriate content across these social networks platforms. Skittles even goes as far as to make as all viewers fill out an age check, because of the inappropriate content. I think that’s a really poor strategy for a brand that is squarely marketed at children.
I feel that one of the primary motivations for a company to create and engage consumers in this emerging media world is the simple fact that company and consumers can now engage in “two-way interactions.” Skittles simply appears uninterested in this back and forth.
By giving up all control, Skittles has deployed a poor and undeveloped social media strategy. Connecting with customers is the primary business goal of social media interaction, but simply throwing up portals and stepping back, and alienating one of its main market segments in the process, sends the wrong message about the brand’s commitment to its fans.
