Using Social Websites to Your Brand’s Advantage
I just stumbled upon the fact that Chocolate Skittles allegedly exist. While researching the validity of this, as well as the availability of said Chocolate Skittles, I checked out skittles.com.
After you enter your birthday on the home page, you are brought to an external site – the official Skittles YouTube landing, which displays Skittles television commercials. In the top left corner of the page, there is a modal navigation bubble (built with Flash) that stays with you as you browse.
When you click on any of their product titles from the “Products” link, you are brought to a page in Wikipedia that displays tabular data of all Skittles products (including international). When you click “Friends” you are brought to the Skittles Facebook Fan Page. Click “Chatter” and it directs to the Skittles Twitter page, while “Videos” takes you to the YouTube page, and “Photos” leads to the Skittles Flickr page.
Skittles are also allowing their customers to interact with the company, and with each other. The Skittles Flickr page aggregates any photo titled with or tagged with “Skittle” or “Skittles.” The same rule is applied to their Twitter page.
The “Contact” page is a bare-bones, static page with a simple form. Any legal information, such as a Privacy Policy, is located under the “Other Gobbledygook” button on the navigation bubble, which expands to display the information.
It amazes me that such a well-known brand has used this method to present themselves on the web. They have used the most popular social websites to their advantage, and likely spent a minimal amount of money to build their site. They are advertising for themselves on all of these sites without even paying for the advertisement.
This is one of the most unique and interesting concepts of a branded website that I have seen. As the popularity of social websites progress, more examples like this will pop up. Just look at how many musical artists have deleted their personal websites and simply use MySpace as an outlet. It’s all about how to reach the largest audience, and social websites are the best tool for that right now.