Twitterers Bust Skittles Campaign
With the emergence of social media, a lot of businesses are hopeful of taking themselves online. However, what they seem to forget is that social media users have a particular culture that they must get to know before they can fully penetrate it. This is the error Skittles committed as they tried to get people to talk about their website last Tuesday.
There is no argument about the influence of social media on the customer-business relationship. A lot of businesses have taken themselves online with high hopes of getting in touch with their customers. Customers, on the other hand, are very inquisitive. As the Church of Customer Blog have claimed, 60% of customers communicate with companies and 56% feel better service because of the open communication.
In fact, customers also want to get in touch with companies. According to the Church of Customer Blog, almost 85% prefer businesses to interact with them.
However, when this interaction turns sour, then we see the worst of the business-customer relationship. This is what happened to Skittles. They have not studied the market before diving. In effect, they received negative feedback. It’s inevitable considering that social media users are very critical having a wide selection of articles and websites to sift through everyday.
The things is, social media users are real people. They have a mind of their own and they are not robots who will follow any company’s command. You have to get their interest for them to talk about you. Forcing them will only result in negative comments as what Skittles experienced.
A notable statement that Brand Keys President Robert Passikoff made on Online Media Daily’s post entitled “Skittles Pulled Twitter Campaign” is that this event is a good example of customer power. No matter what the companies do, people still have the discretion on whether or not they will follow. Well I think this is already embedded in the system. The choice of whether or not to purchase a particular product lies on the person’s decision making process. No one can decide for him than himself.
As Gerry McGovern said in his post entitled “Customer Power Driven by the Web“, customers are more powerful today. Before, companies can arrange certain groups to promote their products. But today, people form groups on their own. The important thing here is that these people have their own united opinion and behavior which is something that companies must be concerned about.
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Ridiculous. No one forced anyone’s hand. People twittered skittles because they wanted to be seen on skittles.com website. I doubt people were typing skittles en masse on twitter before the redesign. And to my knowledge the site started off with Wikipedia and then shifted to Twitter now to Facebook. The Twitter aspect is still on their site, just no longer the front page.
[...] best laid plans of candy makers and social media marketers couldn’t possibly go awry, [...]
I don’t quite understand the point of this article. You repeatedly talk about the “error of Skittles” and the “negative comments” that they have received. But you don’t offer any substantive examples. What errors? What negative comments? The skittles.com portal, as of today (Thursday, March 5), continues to aggregate all forms of social media – including Twitter, Facebook, flickr, Wikipedia, and YouTube. The Skittles Facebook fan page has gotten 500,000+ new fans since the promotion started two days ago. Can you name another company who has recuited half a million fans in forty-eight hours? I doubt it.
This is hardly the “worst of the business-customer relationship.” I think it was a brilliant move on the part of the Skittles marketing team. Risky? Undoubtedly! It took an incredible amount of courage to face down, point-blank, the scathing underbelly of the social networks. Skittles did it, and look how many people are talking about them. It’s only been two days, but so far (at least to me), it seems as though the company has been highly successful.
This is pretty interesting stuff.. Skittles are a dead brand.
[...] best laid plans of candy makers and social media marketers couldn’t possibly go awry, [...]
I saw another article on Skittles that said it was a good campaign. Anyway, whether it was or wasn’t, the point is that marketing is no longer a one way advertisement to the consumer. The consumer now is interactive in that advertisement and some companies might not like what that does.
[...] best laid plans of candy makers and social media marketers couldn’t possibly go awry, [...]
Too bad for Skittles. They just don’t know how to use social media well to promote their product.
What about the old any advertising even bad advertising is better than no advertising at all??? people are still talking so basically it worked
I agree with pierre. people only did this when skittles promoted twitter on its home page.
Well, in my opinion i think it’s natural to get traffic from high traffic site like twitter. might be it’s what skittles thinks