Skittles and Social Media

If you haven’t heard the buzz the past couple weeks, Mar’s candy brand Skittles is trying to show that it embraces social media by mixing things up.  They changed their homepage to reflect their presence on social media sites like Wikipedia, Facebook, and Twitter.  So when you go to skittles.com, what you see will be their page from one of those sites. 

Social media has been almost a cat and mouse game between marketers on consumers.  Consumers find social media they like, and marketers usually aren’t far behind trying to exploit that social medium to get their message in front of those consumers.  So it’s not entirely surprising that – every once in a while – consumers fight back, sending a message to marketers that it’s their turf they’re playing on.

Yesterday, Skittles was using it’s Twitter feed (the page displaying everying consumers are saying about Skittles on Twitter) as its homepage.  That’s when a few Twitterers decided it was time to let Skittles know who’s ground they were on.  Most of the “Tweets” had been about Skittles campaign, until pranksters decided to start posting things the brand really wasn’t comfortable with.  So, Skittles decided yesterday to remove Twitter from its rotating social media homepages.  It’s a risky move to reponde in this way, and we’ll see what kind of consumer backlash happens.  It’ll be interesting to see if their Wikipedia page or Facebook fan page get attacked next – I wouldn’t be surprised if it did.  You can bet everyone in the marketing community is watching to see how this plays out (because if it does, you can’t bet they’ll all be ready to follow in their footsteps… and if it doesn’t you can bet other brand managers and CMO’s will be on CNBC talking about how they’d never do anything like that – Donny Deutch, the soapbox is yours).