There was Web 1.0, then Web 2.0, and everything after is Skittles.
Skittles updated their homepage. It’s now simply a Twitter search page with skittles as the keyword. Clicking on video now takes you to their YouTube page while pictures will take you to their Flickr account and products now simply go to the relevant Wikipedia entries. This is f-ing genius. The game? It has changed.
Mars Inc.’s Skittles brand hired Agency.com to change the whole web game. Every facet, but the contact page, of their previous website has been replaced with simply a link to a third party social media site: product descriptions by Wikipedia, video by YouTube, picures by Flickr, friends by Facebook, and, most importantly, buzz supplied by Twitter.
So what fun can you do with this? Why, profit! C.R.E.A.M. ya’ll!
Seeing as how this is a pretty big deal for Twitter’s Ev Williams and crew, I figured—confirmed later by my sources—they would be eyeing the streams to make sure Skittles doesn’t get the raw end of the deal. Well let’s test how good they really are.
I set up multiple twitter accounts, added a silly Skittles avatar, and proceeded to set up a list of Amazon affiliate links to various Skittles products. For example, did you ever wanted a giant squishy Skittles pillow? Well, here’s your chance, buy it. Or maybe you wanted 40 pounds of Skittles for your swimming pool? Yeah, I got that covered. How about Wild Berry Skittles in bulk? Well, it turns out 0 people found that one interesting. i updated the various Twitter accounts to send out these links every 90 seconds. They all landed on new Skittle’s front page relatively quick after that.
The problem, however, was the fact that so much “chatter” amongst twitter land made it extremely hard for any one person, spam or no spam, to stay relevant. My tweets were pushed off the first page within 10 seconds, the second page by 30 seconds, and completely pointless by a minute.
Using one of the best url shorteners—http://tr.im—I was able to keep track of how many clickthroughs I scored. The above chart says it all. Without knowing the traffic data to skittles.com I’m still going to say the clickthrough rates were abysmal. But I did manage to get commission for two orders.
The fun stopped relatively quick. within 36 minutes of my experiment, my first Twitter account was suspended. within 45 seconds, the rest of my accounts one by one all got suspended. Not only the spam accounts but the vulgar comments tagged with skittles were being deleted too. In real time. Maybe by a Twitter intern.
Twitterati? Welcome to your future.
