I’m a Skittles’ Fan!!!

Today I decided to become a Skittles’ fan! The reason... I logged into my Facebook account this morning and I saw that 6 of my friends had just become Skittles’ “fans”, I remembered all the cool colors of the candies & the nice package and I became a fan too. But, sincerely I have just bought them like tree times in all my life. Right now, Skittles’ Facebook account has 586,132+ fans. Even though they can’t translate fans = sales, it could give them an idea if people are coming to the site and choosing to engage at a deeper level.

Skittles’ website is trying to link different social-media sites in a menu that floats on any of the social networks. Depending on the customer’s behavior, the home page could be the brand’s Twitter or Facebook site, the video games are on Flickr, and the video media is Skittles’ Youtube page. This is a risk that the company is taking because they can’t control the customers’ actions or comments, on the other hand they can participate on the conversations and “talk” directly to the customers.

The brand can measure if the site’s style is working or not by the number of facebook “friends” or the comments on walls and Youtube videos. I think Skittles has applied one of the e-marketing principles “take advantage of others resources” creating a platform that includes the most successful social networks in one website. I should highlight that they did this with a minimal budget spent.

Bringing social tools into Skittles’ website was right, but the brand needs to offer something else after the social media experience to really translate the online succes on sales at the point of purchase. I have to go; I need to grab some skittles…

Juan Francisco