My first reaction to Skittles.com turning their homepage into a hashtag (anybody who puts #skittles or mentions Skittles in their Twitter update) search result from the Twitter conversation was not positive. I mean look at this mess of an eyesore of two overlays:

But once past the terrible web design, I started thinking about marketing. Much more positive thoughts streamed in.

Skittles doesn’t have to keep this homepage for very long and I suspect when they see some of the hashtag spamming and racial slurs being posted through Twitter, they will get rid of it. It has succeeded in getting some passionate, web savvy folks talking about Skittles a lot more than they were yesterday. It’s got bloggers talking about them. Skittles is getting their name out there. A round of applause.

Then I started thinking about what Skittles, the candy, are. They are tiny pieces of yummy candy that, like Starburst, have many different packages of flavors. You munch a couple of them here and there. They are tiny like Twitter updates. Lots to be compared between the two. What kind of people munch on Skittles anyway? It’s a pretty good analogy to making Twitter updates. I give the marketing department thumbs up on this experiment as long as they don’t keep this gimmick running very long and let it get further vandalized. Here’s my famous Skittles tweet:

Sweet, can finally scratch off my life goal list making it to the #skittles homepage!

Now let’s hope we don’t see this copycatted by other ‘small’ things from marketing department. This is a one-off marketing idea and the other companies who jump aboard are not going to fare nearly as well in the buzz department.

WAIT - Wasting the buzz

But wait, this marketing buzz might be mostly for not. Just looked at the Google search results for Skittles and check out the results:

Notice the prominence of “Products” by Google? Now look what happens when you click on the Skittles product page link. It leads to a 404 not found IIS server message:

What? Did the marketing department forget to tell the webmaster that people might follow the buzz and try to maybe look up products? This is wasting the buzz! Skittles web monkeys get the wrench to this ASAP or your buzz will disappear like, well, the taste of skittles in your mouth.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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