There’s been a lot of buzz in the last few days about Skittles’ new website. Basically it’s a stream of all the tweets from Twitter that mention skittles. Um, why do I care? Your candy is neat; I get it. I don’t need to see a stream of tweets to know that.
The site also connects to Skittles’ Facebook and YouTube pages. In the corner of every page is an annoying box that helps (if you can call it that) navigate the site.
My blast: Social media is important. It’s a necessary component to a website. Ok, Skittles, 2 points for that. But it doesn’t need to be your entire site. You would have done better to design an appealing home page with a small Twitter search box, a button linking to Facebook, and a single video (with links to the others). That way you cover all your bases without looking trashy, the way the site does now. It looks like a marketing major (freshman) came up with what they thought was a great idea. Fail.
I clicked on a link from the Skittles site that took me to some Mars (parent company) healthy living site. From a candy company?? If I wanted to know how to live healthy, I wouldn’t be eating Skittles!!
I just don’t agree with the lemmings on this one. The site sucks and is poorly implemented. Skittles, feel free to call Egg Marketing to fix it.
What do you think? Feel free to disagree (although you’d be wrong. I am always right!)
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Susan Payton is the Marketing Eggspert, and owner of 
As someone who works at an interactive agency, I can’t help but to pick the site apart. The site is awkward and is an example of really poor design. I’m also left wondering, what’s the point? How does this site SELL skittles? From a campaign aspect, it looks pretty weak. It also doesn’t work for me in FireFox 2 (YIKES!)
However, I’m drawn to the first line of your post: “There’s been a lot of buzz in the last few days about Skittles’ new website”. They did something that was completely unexpected, and people are REALLY responding to it. Kudos to Skittles for that. The question is, how long will that buzz last?
I think in a week, it will be old news and Skittles will be left with a site that decidedly DOESN’T make me want to go out and buy Skittles.
Thanks for the great comment, Jeremy. I’m glad someone agrees w/ me. I hate bringing attention to bad marketing, bc like you said, it’s still giving them buzz. But I always feel like it still puts them in a bad light to be blasted, so hopefully people will boycott bad taste by not eating Skittles today!
I think the Skittles site has probably achieved its original goal of selling Skittles. I suspect the brand awareness boost they received today has been very positive.
I’m not sure Egg Marketing, with the stock Joomla Favicon should really be throwing stones…
Touche, Colin. Good thing I have a new web design to unveil. So leave my Joomla alone!
It’s just a matter of time before people spam it with really rude nasty tweets. Besides the poor design, who wants to have no control over the content on your site. Even those newscasts on TV that use Twitter feeds always edit the content for obscenities before it goes over the air. Just dumb.
Well, they did get publicity. And also I wouldn’t connect bad website with bad candy. I think for candies you need to get the name out. People buy it when they are curious, and they decide if they will keep buying them after they’ve tried it. It’s not a service. It’s not a complicated machine. People know what candies are, so I’m thinking a bad website wouldn’t do much damage.
With my toddler, then I, being sick, I wasn’t spending much time on Twitter during the whole Skittles discussion, so I missed it (except hearing just enough to know “something” was up).
I came across this post (thank you), and checked out the Skittles link. The navigation box is indeed super annoying. I don’t like that I have to enter my birthdate and agree to terms just to visit a candy site.
Interestingly enough, there was no Twitter stream. It landed directly on the Wikipedia page for Skittles. I’m not getting that. If they are doing a transition (which by the screen shot above and explanation of what was going on with their site, they need to), it seems another fail to show the Wikipedia page (another way to have no control over what appears on your own site about your own brand). Surely a transition page could be put up in the meantime. Or is the Wikipedia page really their new homepage?