Skittles Social Media Trial Continues

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

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.