Photography, art, things that occur to me.
I shot this photo this evening with my new iPhone and immediately emailed it to Jean and uploaded it to my Facebook page. That’s about the time commitment I’m able to put into this on a regular basis these days. I know some of you reading this feel like learning to read blogs was enough for a while, but I’ll go ahead and say it: If you’re not on Facebook, you’re missing a lot of Conrad photos.
Originally published on Conversations & Connections, my SAS social media blog
So Skittles threw in the towel. They didn’t have the stomach for profanities and racial slurs showing up on their “homepage,” which they had given over to a Twitter search page showing real-time results for “Skittles.” When I wrote about this yesterday, I was thinking of it as a bold move, and even with all the potential pitfalls it would probably still pay off for Skittles in terms of attention.
I wasn’t surprised to see how the public played with the shiny new toy Skittles handed to them. What does surprise me, though, is that Skittles seems to have been surprised. Didn’t they know this was going to happen? They must have had hours and hours of internal debate about the wisdom of this move. I’m reminded of the movie War Games, where the computer goes haywire at the end and the screen scrolls the list of all the possible conflicts it is programmed to consider, like “USSR first strike” and “Albanian decoy” and “Canadian thrust.” In the Skittles war room, didn’t they have a big board with “racist hijack” and “profanity blitzkrieg”?
I’m wondering, based on a not-inconsiderable experience with the way decisions can be made in large companies, if someone a level or three above the person who decided to begin this experiment stepped in and decided to end it when they saw how it was going.
Corporate marketers expanding their presence in social media are used to answering the question, “What will you do if someone says something negative about your products or your company?” and the answer usually is something along the lines of, “At least the negative comments will be on our site where we will know about them and can respond in an open, transparent way.”
Yes, but what about when there’s nothing to respond to, when the negativity is purely for the sake of negativity? That’s when we really find out how thick or thin are corporate skins are.
Yesterday I also said, “Naturally, some people can’t resist the urge to spam the channel with anti-Skittles childishness, but they’ll get tired of that eventually.” I just spent five minutes paging through search results and couldn’t find a single obscene or racist tweet. While “skittles” was the number one trending topic on Twitter yesterday, it’s not even showing up on the top ten today.
Maybe Skittles melted too soon. With the short attention span of online pranksters, maybe they only had to wait another day to get out of the crosshairs. No less a social media personage than Charlene Li has already declared that the Skittles experiment “redefined branding.” Maybe they were mere hours away from becoming the social media success story of 2009, rather than a case study of how social media can bite back.
Like the number of licks required to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop, the world may never know.
Originally published on Conversations & Connections, my SAS social media blog
One of the conversations we’ve had most often at SAS around our participation in social media channels involves the control of our brand, or more accurately the realization that every company has come to in the last few years: We no longer control our brand. Our message is determined as much or more by what people are saying about us than what we’re saying about ourselves. That’s pretty much an accepted Social Media 101 principle these days.
Skittles, the candy company, has taken it to the furthest extreme. As of now, if you go to www.skittles.com, their homepage is a Twitter search feed for "skittles." A pop-up box gives you further options, including Friends, which takes you to Skittles’ Facebook fan page. The Media link gives you the choice for Video, which takes you to YouTube, and Pics, which takes you to Flickr.
By doing this, Skittles has turned their brand over to the public more than any company I can think of. Is it a good idea? There’s lots of debate about that on Twitter, with opinions ranging, as they inevitably do, from "brilliant" to "idiotic." But by the nature of the change they’ve made, the conversation is essentially taking place on Skittles’ homepage. And, most important of all, it’s taking place. When was the last time you thought about Skittles? What else could have gotten me to blog about Skittles?
Of course, the discussion will die down, and generating a lively debate in social media channels isn’t going to sell more candy. But this decision makes a lot of sense for a consumer product like Skittles. I never looked at their website before today, but I imagine they had a hard time keeping it interesting. How much is there to say about fruit candy other than contests and maybe a new flavor every now and then? Skittles has made the medium the message, and by adopting social media channels as their primary means of communication, they have a lot more chance of getting people talking about them. Naturally, some people can’t resist the urge to spam the channel with anti-Skittles childishness, but they’ll get tired of that eventually. In other words, I don’t think they had a lot to lose, and a tremendous amount to gain.
What’s the lesson for an enterprise technology company like SAS? Well, it’s not "replace the homepage with a Twitter search." SAS solutions come in a lot of flavors and sas.com does a great job of conveying information to customers and potential customers that couldn’t be accomplished through social media alone.
But what about the people who would never think to come to our homepage? There are lots of people in business, in academia, in government who use SAS software every day but don’t think to come find out what’s new. Plus, SAS software plays a behind-the-scenes role in nearly everybody’s life. Those are the messages we can convey in social media, to audiences who don’t know yet how much they want to know about us.