In case you missed it, the official skittles website located at Skittles.com last night redirected their entire homepage to a twitter search for the term [skittles]. I applaud their effort to embrace bold new ideas but their execution leaves a lot to be desired. I thought I’d run through some of them in hopes some of you might learn something:
- Use a NSFW filter to keep porn, racial slurs, or just plain rude and obnoxious comments of the stream. Twitter has one and used it during the presidential debates.
- Add a leet speak filter again they need to filter out more more NSFW terms. Additionally use regular expression to filter out use of periods, spaces and dashes for NSFW terms.
- Use a competition filter, don’t publish mentions of snickers, Mike & Ikes, or any other candy.
- Filter out link drops, the potential for links to Goatcx, tubgirl or lemon party is too much (looks them up on your own if you don’t know what they are, be warned NSFW).
- Filter out any scripting or HTML just to be safe.
- Limit the number of times someone gets posted to once every 30 to 60 minutes. This will cut down on the likelyhood someone will fins a hole that lets bad info get through.
- Don’t replace your product pages with wikipedia pages, pages that anyone can edit are too much of a target for people to mess with.
- Keep as much of your existing web structure in place, don’t 301 or 404 it, having a massive sitewide shift like that isn’t a signal of quality to the search engines.
- Leave some content on the pages for the search engines and don’t use an H1 tag with over 50 words in ok?
- Grab all of your trademarked names and play with the community. I personally grabbed @skittlescandy for them so a bad person didn’t (hey skittles reach out I’ll get that over to you).
Lastly I’m going to take the position and call this is a WIN for skittles. Like Motrin did in the Motrin Moms “scandal” they will take hit and look like weenies in the eyes of the techno elite for some critical and 100% preventable mistakes. However in a few days they will be bathing in the mostly positive after glow of trying something different, getting a ton of attention, and a ton of links … so I say WAY TO GO SKITTLES!
For other viewpoint see
Skittles: Tweet the rainbow (or racial slurs)
Skittles Site Receives an Extreme Social Makeover
The New Skittles Website Is A Twitter Search For “Skittles”
Social Media Zeitgeist Takes Over Skittles.com
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{ 25 comments }
Hey, it’s not just a Twitter experiment.
They are running Facebook for ‘Friends’, Youtube for ‘Videos’ and Flickr for ‘photos’. Check out the rest of their links
And what publicity they are getting. Seems like they read Aaron Wall’s Branding post!
great quick post, i really like the competitive filter, because i can see how much fun their competitors can have with their website…
im not sure that the SERPs is going to be an issue, once the press start really pumping this story with a massive number of backlinks, i wouldnt be suprised to see them start to rank #1 for a number of related terms such as “candy” “sweets”
I agree with you that this is a Win for Skittles and how they are embracing social media, but it makes me wonder (if they keep it up) how Google will react to what will obviously be a duplicate content issue since they are just pulling the Twitter search feed for their homepage content. Thoughts?
it’s an ajax iframe so doubt google can “see” into it, but having an empty homepage not a good long term strategy
I have to say, I feel like right now, total FAIL for skittles in regards to what they have now, but they could turn it around. I wrote up what I did to show the areas in which they failed. You’ve really given them some great advice on how to turn this around for it to be a success.
I personally think that if they want to engage the twitter crowd more that they should change the home to a skittles branded twitter page. (e.g. @skittlescandy like you mentioned) Keep the search feature on the chatter page to reduce the noise. You still have the conversation and engagement this way.
The main thing is, they have to make at least a few of these changes for it to be successful, in my opinion.
It works if it gets the publicity (which it has). Well done Skittles!
Couldn’t disagree more I’m afraid.
“However in a few days they will be bathing in the mostly positive after glow of trying something different, getting a ton of attention”
But for what exactly? They’ve not actually ‘done’ anything.
It’s a gimmick. No added benefit to the user, no ‘real’ engagement: it strikes me as being entirely aimed at the exact tiny little techno elite you mention (i.e. people on Twitter will talk about it because it uses Twitter – it’s like an echo of a reflection.
Utterly pointless – if it wasn’t a ‘first’ (which it actually isn’t) no-one would be talking about it except to ask what the point is.
of course it’s a gimmick, just like the motrin moms thing was. The twitterverse was all in an uproar how they had insulted motherhood and the entire female gender at the time, three months later it’s a pimple only referenced by marketers and twitter addicts. So three months from now when all the silly pranks are a distant memory all those links to skittles.com will remain, and I’d call that a success.
Your point about the NSFW filter is well taken, though I also think that Skittle’s marketing was actually right in *not* filtering the competitive brands. They are pushing the entire conversation, which to me says that on balance they are extremely confident in the reputation of the brand, and, respect me enough to show me the actual, complete conversation. How many of us (as individuals) would do this with our names when people visited our personal websites.
Good post Michael,
I wrote about it on my blog. Truth be told, Skittles wanted the buzz (you can see the TwitScoop snippets I grabbed). And in any case, if it’s done inappropriately, hell, the PR people on Twitter can help
Silly pranks work well if you can hold onto the interest. As I’ve said before, getting 15 minutes is easy enough but keeping their attention after it’s over is the difference.
Yeah, as an example of classic bait-and-switch they’re doing pretty well, just waiting to see what they pull out for the switch .. for their sakes I hope it’s something awesome.
I also see this as a major FAIL for the reasons Ciaran stated, but also because it’s sole draw right now is the fact it’s a freak show. I keep rubbernecking this train wreck like I’m looking for mangled bodies and severed limbs.
The web moves far too fast to have the initial excitement about your “innovation” being the fact you can tweet things that would make a drunken salior blush followed by the word “skittles” and it will show up on their page. By the time they work out the kinks the initial oh and ah of what they’ve done will be long gone, and the site will already have jumped the shark. Actually, with the attention it’s already getting for failing it think it already has.
I agree it’s a win – when’s the last time so many people were talking about Skittles? Ever? So what if they had some technology goofs, that doesn’t say anything negative about the quality of their product.
Excellent advice Michael, I was unaware of many of these methods used to filter. Regardless of all the trash talk seen in the stream, I too think this will go as a WIN for Skittles. I’m wondering now if similar campaigns will work for non big name brands, or do you have to be a Motrin/Skittles/Mentos to get such attention.
Hmmm – seem to be a lot less comments here than the email alerts I’m getting would suggest. Anyway, I’ll be quick.
Michael – not everything is about SEO/links (as you well know – else why would you spend so much time on Twitter?) What exactly do they need those links to rank for, their brand name? Pointless stunt maybe? And once this gimmick has fizzled out (give it a week or two) what will they have left for their (I would imagine) pretty big investment? Absolutely nothing.
One of the invisible comments said: “I agree it’s a win – when’s the last time so many people were talking about Skittles? Ever? So what if they had some technology goofs, that doesn’t say anything negative about the quality of their product.”
But that’s exactly it isn’t it? It says nothing about their product, brand or anything else. It’s the equivalent of new for new’s sake. if I take a photo of my foot and put that on the home page of a major brand, would I be lauded? It’d be a world first and would, I’d imagine, generate some ‘conversation’.
It’s like we’ve all turned into magpies, daring brands to pull out something newer & shinier, rather than encouraging them to produce something interesting, entertaining or, God forbid, useful. Pointless doesn’t have to be rubbish: just look at the Cadbury’s Gorilla or the T-Mobile flash-mob dance – neither totally original, but genuinely fun & engaging. This is a triumph of style over substance, except it’s not even all that stylish.
No, this is a FAIL: for Skittles, the marketing industry, and, I’m afraid, all those who stand around and cheer on such inanity.
Seems the invisible comments turned up when I posted. Never mind.
I’ve got wp-cache in lockdown mode running (had a nice traffic spike yesterday) there’s a lag time for comments hen you do, not doing the censoring thing, that’s just bad mojo.
So it has been a clever move from skittles!
They kicked up a fuss and all publicity whether positive or negative is good for them.
As you noticed David, they are certainly to get huge number of backlinks for free, LoL ))), and even that alone, on my opinon, was worth the move!
By the way, I have read another SEO blog today where the TC was quite excited about twitters as being a great way for both making friends and site promotion, and he urged everyone to share their twitters ID’s right there on the blog!
)
Oh, My… the rumors spread fast!
Great idea, missed the due diligence on covering the bases but shows complete transparency.
thanks
the page skitless.com redirect me to page wit this warning “Just a heads up: Any stuff beyond the Skittles.com page is actually another site and not in our control. This panel may be hovering over the page, but SKITTLES® isn’t responsible for what other people post and say on these sites. Click the box below to acknowledge that you know SKITTLES® isn’t responsible for that stuff.”the minimize and the close marks is do not works when I hit it ,and really scary the page behind the site is a WIKIPEDIA back ground that tell “the dictionary of skitless I don’t know what there doing here.but if they doing this for SEO project ,I comment,they do a really “bad idea”
Firstly, the Skittles brand (and a company in the candy industry) has the luxury of such an experiment to this degree. It doesn’t work for brands that need to have a significant focus on maintaining and building credibility.
From a usability perspective it’s a disaster and jolting, though they’re obviously aware of this and are OK with it. After all, “jolting” is consistent with the brand. It feels like a popup window and since it’s not what people are used to, it interrupts the intended search path to a degree (away from Google or other search engine). Personally it’s not what I want when I go to a typical company.com website – though for something like Skittles, it’s fine.
If their goal was to generate buzz about the Skittles brand, then yes this experiment has already been successful.
The REAL measure of success will be the answer to this question:
Did it sell more fruity candy?
I agree this was bold, but suspect if they had used the filters they would have been bashed for censoring what the people really had to say.
I also agree they said have participated in the conversation and not just rebroadcast everything everyone else said. Through participation they could have down played or reduced the undesirable messages.
Has there been an audit of how the twitter experiment went? Was it generally positive or were there a few trolls that got involved?
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