Archives for posts with tag: buzz

Skittles Social Media Trial Continues

March 4, 2009 //
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Skittles have continued their social media/viral buzz marketing testing by today redirecting their homepage to the skittles Facebook group.

skittles-facebook-experiment

Some reports (notably here) have this as a reaction to the defamatory tweets which were being plastered across the homepage during the twitter trial, I beg to differ.  The guys at skittles had to know that by allowing people access to their homepage they were going to get jokers who were going to get a kick out of writing “skittles suck” or much harsher words and seeing them displayed for all to see.  I don’t believe a multinational brand wouldn’t have thought about this.  But the fact is, most tweets were present for less than 30 seconds and so they didn’t get much air time really.

I believe the guys at skittles are still in a testing period and they probably always planned a test with the Facebook page as part of the trial.  After all, there have been occurrences in twitter downtime of it being redirected to a Wikipedia page about skittles.  They are obviously undertaking a larger social experiment than just what we saw with the twitter search.  What exactly they are playing at, and whether it is anything more than a viral marketing exercise, I don’t know.  Hopefully things will become clearer in the coming days and weeks.

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Categories Social Media

Skittles’ Twitter Experiment – Lots of Buzz, But What Next?

March 2, 2009 //
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The twitter world has been buzzing today due to a social media experiment by confectionary brand Skittles.  Skittles.com was handed over to the twitter community when the website was redirected to a twitter search page for the phrase “skittles”.  Cue thousands of twitter uses tweeting the phrase to get their 20 seconds of fame on the skittles homepage; hundreds of bloggers (like me!) were posting their thoughts on the social experiment, some good, and some bad.

skittles-twitter-trendSome believed it was a clear example of a company “not getting it”.  Social Media is about engagement right?  You should be listening, thinking, and engaging the community surely? Not just displaying a load of random tweets that include your brand name?

Some were complimenting skittles.  For trying something new, for experimenting with twitter and social media.  After all the world of twitter was buzzing with skittles mentions, every other tweet mentioned skittles and surely that counts for something right?  Well I doubt it is going to sell many extra bags of sweets, but I can’t remember the last time I mentioned or thought about skittles, so there something gained from the stunt.

Whether you believe the move to be a success or not depends, as always, how you define success.  If the aim of the exercise was to put something out there, in the aim of getting some exposure and trying something new, then it is a clear success.  Brand wise, the only harm came from the spammers and comedians who chose post less than complimentary words about skittle and revel in the irony of the statements appearing on skittles.com.

skittles-twitter-experiment

If the objective was to sell more skittles, well, hmmm….I’m not sure it could be deemed a success.

But the bigger question for me is what next for skittles?  They have gained all the buzz which came from the experiment.  But surely the homepage isn’t going to stay like that for an extended period?  It’s not much of a user experience!  It’s not even been done in an aesthetically pleasing way.

So where does skittles take it next? Do they have another stunt lined up? Are they going to use any of the posts they have received today for further activity?

The Buzz was great, loads of exposure for the brand, if only within the twitter community.  They also gain a bit of kudos for having the balls to pull such a stunt and doubtless they will go into numerous presentations as an example of twitter usage, but without something more to follow it up, this will only last so long. Buzz and the viral impact of marketing only last so long, so where next skittles?  What else have you got in store for us?

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Categories Social Media

Yahoo! Buzz – more social integration from Yahoo!

February 26, 2008 //
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yahoo buzz

I have just come across the Yahoo! Buzzapplication which is currently in beta testing.  From what I can see this is very much like Digg and Sphinn in that users provide articles of interest which are then voted on by the users to push them up the listings. 

Stories are given a “buzz score” which is ”derived from search term popularity, the number of times a story is emailed from Buzz, and the number of votes a story receives.”  Which could add a slight element of mystery if it is more than simply a case of adding the sum of all these parts together.  If it is going to work much like the quality score system in PPC then it may change the game a little and avoid all the spamming which takes place in Digg.  There will apparently be a manual editorial team in place to prevent spamming from taking place but how many and how effective they will be remains to be seen.

The other major twist in the tale is the statement from the site “stories with the highest Buzz Scores may be published on the Yahoo! home page.”  this would make the reach of top performing articles massive and the potential of this new application greater than that of Digg and Sphinn as it goes beyond the user base of the programme itself.  Apparently the same editorial team which will monitor the spam will also be responsible for deciding which stories are worthy of the Yahoo homepage exposure.  It will be interested to see what prominence these articles are given as they are free content and so Yahoo! would potentially be losing out on revenue if they replaced any of the paid placements.

It will be interesting to see how this progresses and whether the exposure on the Yahoo! homepage can make it a bigger property than the more established players in social bookmarking.

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Categories Social Networking