excerpt from skittles home page, March 2, 2009

A few weeks ago Agency.com and Skittles kicked off “Interweb the rainbow”, a brilliant marketing campaign that involved multiple social networks. The idea was simple: replace the Skittles.com home page with different social network sites. Late that Sunday evening, they set it up to show everything that people were saying on Twitter about Skittles. Everything, good, bad, or indifferent.

On Monday, Skittles was the #1 topic on Twitter.

By Tuesday, there were zillions of blog posts as well as positive presss in the Wall Street Journal, LA Times, the Financial Times and Advertising Age. Gender differences in response to Skittlemania has oodles more links.

Skittlemania died down by Wednesday, and Skittles.com started showing their Facebook page instead of Twitter. A lot of critics saw this as a retreat, although I tend to agree with Charlene Li that it was probably their plan all along. Publicity continued with articles in AP, Business Week, and Forbes. Pretty good media coverage, I’d say. Agency.com and Mars (who owns Skittles) are presumably quite pleased.

In this series I’ll discuss what activists can learn from the Skittles experience — and poets, too, for reasons that’ll become clear in the next few days.

Twitter: an epicenter for buzz

If you’re new to Twitter, Deanna Zandt’s Why Twitter, anyways? and A non-fanatical beginner’s guide to Twitter are great starting points, and there’s more information on the #p2 (”progressives 2.0″) wiki including accessibility and useful hashtags. Something that’s hard to realize without hanging out there, though, is what an incredible place it is for creating buzz.

Twitter’s filled with highly-networked people into PR, marketing, social media, and blogging. It’s got great viral propagation mechanisms like hashtags, Follow Friday and Women2follow Wednesdays, and the Monday night Journalist/PR chat. In fact, right now Twitter’s quite possibly the most buzz-enabling place on the internet. And the numbers you need to start getting attention are still surprisingly small. In November, a few thousand Motrin Moms went from Twitter to the New York Times in 24 hours.

And while there was an ad agency and a bit of custom software development involved, Skittlemania was a heck of a lot cheaper than most if not all of the classics on Mustafa’s excellent list of amazing viral marketing successes in Social Media Icon. For the anti-Scientology activists of Anonymous, the anti-Scientology activists known as Anonymous, who leveraged Skittlemania to get their message in a screenshot in the LA Times, it was even cheaper. So Lesson #1:

Activists and poets — and anybody else who wants media attention without spending a lot of money — should consider including Twitter in their plans.

Stay tuned!

In my next installment, I’ll focus on a situation ripped from today’s headlines. The Ask the President project, launched on Thursday in Ari Melber’s The People’s Press Conference, offers poets and activists a chance to propose and vote on questions for White House press conferences.

Can Skittles help?

jon

Thanks to:

• Felicity and Ian of the Progressive Exchange for feedback when I first floated the idea for this series on Progressive Exchange
• Debra J, Sarah J, Shaun, Jason, Gregory K, Myrna the Minx, noxhanti, Charlotte-Anne, Mikal, Kevin, NuMo725 mrscarpediem, Ari and everybody else for feedback on the previous draft via Twitter, my blog, and email.
• Jason and The Seminal for the opportunity to explore Skittles and all the flexibility
  

Jon Pincus is a strategist, writer, and activist living in the Seattle area, currently working with Deborah Pierce and his brother Greg on Tales from the Net, a book on social networks. As well as being an co-founder with Tracy Viselli of the #p2 (”progressives2.0″) Twitter hashtag and an organizer for the Voter Suppression Wiki and Get FISA Right , he’s vice-chair for online visibility for the 2009 ACM Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference. He blogs about these and other topics at Liminal States and elsewhere.

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