The case study that I chose to write my paper on was the Skittles Twitter campaign. Basically Skittles thought it would be a good idea to completely transform their website's homepage into a live Twitter feed. They made it so that every time someone tweeted the word "Skittles" anywhere in Twitter, that sentence would show up on the Skittles website on their Twitter feed. This sounded like a good idea at the time, but they soon realized that people were using the word Skittles in profane sentences, and those sentences were showing up on their website. Many people think that they failed with their campaign because the profanity became too overwhelming and they had to take the Twitter feed off of their website. I think that it was somewhat successful though, because it got people talking about Skittles. I think it was a good use of social media because at the time they started the campaign Twitter was the #3 most visited social media networking website with over 54 million visitors every month. Whether it was a good idea or a bad idea the saying still remains. "Any press is good press."
Here are some links that help explain exactly what happend.
http://www.badidea.co.uk/2009/03/skittles-twitter-campaign-turns-into-potty-mouthed-echo-chamber/
http://www.businessweek.com (type in Skittles in the search bar)
http://www.marketingpilgrim.com (type in Skittles in the search bar)
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I actually never heard of this until now and it's really interesting. I have some mixed thoughts on if it was successful or not. Yes, they got people talking about skittles but that's probably not their main intention. It's too bad that immature people have to ruin things like this for other people who actually use creativity and put in a lot of effort to actually see it happen.
ReplyDeleteI think this was an interesting idea with a terrible end. Skittles is candy and kids are the most obsessed with candy and all this profanity is not a good image at all for them. They had a good idea that turned out horrible in the end. Having a ton of profanity on any business website is not a good idea at all.
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