
Skittles.com: Interweb the rainbow - mariorz
http://skittles.com/
======
patio11
If there were ever a book written entitled "How To Spend Money While Not
Selling Candy", chapter one would probably be "Turn your website into the
brief object of fascination of people using another service, who have the
collective attention span of an ADHD squirrel hopped up on crystal meth".

P.S. Did anyone even notice they linked their product pages to Wikipedia? I'm
thinking that sounded very hip and progressive at the planning meeting.

~~~
bouncingsoul
It _is_ hip and progressive: they're sacrificing an opportunity to present
their products in the best light possible, and are instead trusting the
general public to describe them. To me that's a huge display of confidence in
their product.†

You say Skittles is wasting money and misdirecting effort, but it seems
opposite. How much does this gimmick actually cost? All the content is hosted
and delivered (and in some cases created) by other people. Skittles' site
wasn't popular before and the next couple days will get a lot of hip people
thinking about Skittles, so it's seems like a great move.

† It's also not that big a deal since it's, you know, candy, which usually
puts people in a good mood. I doubt most makers of consumer electronics would
display unfiltered commentary from their customers.

~~~
seldo
I couldn't agree more.

This is a huge, huge branding win the Skittles guy. Thousands upon thousands
of people who would never visit their site (I mean, who the hell visits a
website for a candy?) are not only visiting but immediately talking about it
to all their friends. Skittles on Facebook has nearly 600,000 fans, more than
John McCain, who I assure you spent a LOT more money trying to get people to
like him.

Sure, people will say stupid stuff and try to mess with it. But the majority
of people are saying funny or at least neutral stuff, and are drowning them
out -- just like in the real world. The confidence in the resilience of their
brand and in the technology behind this is impressive. These people Get It,
get it even more than some readers of Hacker News.

~~~
endtime
_Skittles on Facebook has nearly 600,000 fans, more than John McCain, who I
assure you spent a LOT more money trying to get people to like him._

Well, that's not entirely fair. Most of the people using Facebook are what,
14-22? Definitely in the Skittles demographic. In the McCain demographic? Not
so much.

~~~
teej
There are a lot more stay-at-home moms on Facebook than you'd think.

------
alaskamiller
The Internet now has three phases: Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and Skittles.

~~~
unalone
I don't know how citation works in these cases, but I think you should get
credit for bringing this story to everybody's attention on IRC before it got
submitted.

~~~
alaskamiller
HN user Mazy actually pinged me about it first and based on the Twitter search
results it seems quite a few figured it out a couple minutes prior. Overall,
awesome news is awesome news.

~~~
axod
I'm really not seeing why it's awesome. Would it have been awesome if they
just redirected to a google search for 'skittles'?

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reidab
<http://www.modernista.com/> (an ad agency) has been doing something similar
for a while. Seems a bit copycat.

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ja2ke
I wonder how hard a sell this was at the pitch meeting. On one hand, it's
pretty unorthodox, especially for a snack food or junk food, which generally
have product sites which are the web equivalent of the back of a cereal box,
at best.

On the other hand, how many times has a marketing VP said "get us on Facebook,
get us on Wikipedia, get us on Twitter, get us on flickr, get us on YouTube!"
and had the advertising team reply with a site containing nothing but a set of
six buttons which do nothing but that? Pretty hilarious.

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unalone
That's pretty damn incredible. They're taking a risk, but at the same time
their home page is fascinating now.

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dkokelley
They 2.0'd their site:

Home/Chatter: _Twitter_ , Friends: _Facebook_ , Videos: _Youtube_ , Pics:
_Flickr_ , Products: _Wikipedia_

The only normal (traditional) thing about their site is the contact page. If
they _really_ wanted to go all out they would have only used myspace messages
for contacting them.

~~~
seldo
It's amazing. Not only do they have a ground breaking site and a ton of viral
traffic, _they're not even paying for the hosting_. They're getting Facebook,
and Google, and Yahoo, and (cough) millions of altruistic donors to Wikipedia
to foot the bill.

I'm sold. This isn't gimmicky, this is _brilliant_.

------
prakash
For a second there, I thought that was a twitter search page, and that
skittles had put ads on it since the search term was _skittles_ , and that
twitter finally started making money of their service!!

~~~
wenbert
twitter == public feedback page

------
marksutherland
What strikes me as odd is that it's all centralized at skittles.com . This
sort of marketing obsoletes the need for a TLD that you try and entice your
customers to visit, instead it allows you to engage with your customer where
they are. Yeah, this made for a good publicity stunt, but it's nothing that
plenty of other companies aren't doing far more subtley. Do you really want
the player to know they're being played? ;)

------
Raphael
I thought it was hacked, but this is legit.

~~~
thomasswift
and apparently racists love skittles

~~~
SwellJoe
Would it help if Skittles offered watermelon flavor?

Edit: OK, so I'm going to explain the humor and the criticism here, since I'm
being voted down and I actually wanted to get a point across with this
comment. thomasswift's comment of "and apparently racists love skittles"
rubbed me the wrong way, in that it seems to implicate Skittles in the racism
by association (or even just accepts the premise that by allowing people to
say anything about Skittles on their home page they were tacitly endorsing
everything people say about Skittles). I thought my comment was over the top
enough to be obvious. But, I'm pretty sure every satirical comment I've made
in the past couple of months here has been voted down. Hackers love satire. I
dunno who you humorless ninnies are, but you aint who I wanna hang out with.
I'm guessing you're new around here.

~~~
thomasswift
I originally wrote my comment in regards to the fact that about 8 tweets you
can see on the page that were not obscured but the red boxes were extremely
racist, hence what I said.

I did not mean to imply if you a non-racist person that likes skittles then
you are a racist, or skittle endorses racism or anything like that.

Also other people seem to notice people taking advantage of this.

>> Naturally, people are already spamming the hell out of this. One tweet
being repeated over and over again unfortunately uses a racial slur. As such,
I suspect this little experiment will end rather soon for Skittles. This is
from a venturebeat article - [http://venturebeat.com/2009/03/01/skittles-
tweet-the-rainbow...](http://venturebeat.com/2009/03/01/skittles-tweet-the-
rainbow-or-racial-slurs/)

I don't usually like to comment when people downmod me, they probably had a
reason, but I feel like I should try to explain this one.

~~~
SwellJoe
I don't think your comment deserved downmods, either. It just seemed, to me,
to be a simplistic view of the situation, and maybe the one that the old media
would take (along the lines of Fox News approach to the Internet: a place for
child predators and cyberterrorists). And, so, I made a joke that I thought
pointed out the ridiculousness of that simple view; when you give your
customers the ability to say _anything_ they will say bad and good things. And
that's OK. It doesn't mean anyone approves...just that people get to have
their say.

My little moment of bitchery was about the humorless folks who've been voting
down comic gold around these parts because it's biting. I've seen it enough
lately, in my posts and others, that it feels like a pattern. And it's a
pattern I don't like.

~~~
scott_s
I don't think his comment endorsed that view at all. I saw it as a surprised
reaction to see blatant racism on the front page of the website for a popular
candy.

Also: you have to consider that people aren't voting you down because your
humor is biting, but because it's not funny and doesn't add to the
conversation.

~~~
SwellJoe
_you have to consider that people aren't voting you down because your humor is
biting, but because it's not funny and doesn't add to the conversation_

Maybe you're rig....nah! That's not it!

Ninny.

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mtrichardson
Pretty disgusting spam popping up there (along with the rest of the stuff -
pretty awesome).

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sachinag
This is a process story co-opted by our Madison Avenue overlords.

Oh, how I hate process stories.

------
jjames
I for one welcome our new skwittle overlords. Skittles: the official candy of
the twitterati?

