No pot of gold at the end of the rainbow

Ever since Tuesday March 3rd this subject has been blogged about and discussed effusively. So now it’s my turn to throw my own golden coin into the pot at the end of the rainbow. In a strike of momentary genius, the confectionary giant Skittles switched its homepage to a Twitter search feed for “Skittles” conversations. Genius!

Of course, it was only momentary. For the social media savvy Twitter community quickly realised that there were no Skittles or Mars representative’s behind the Twitter campaign, that Skittles was not contributing to the community conversation, and quite possibly that there were “paid for” Twitter users trying to boost the positive comments rolling into the feed. Negative comments spread like wild fire on Twitter and before they knew what was happening, Skittles found their feed riddled with negative comments, unrelated content and profanity.

It was the confectionary Gods versus the social media Gods, and we all know who won out. Skittles pulled the plug on the Twitter feed and instead the homepage now displays…. the Skittles Wikipeadia entry!

Although the whole exercise went horribly wrong for Skittles with no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, they did get A LOT of people talking and A LOT of media buzz. I really hope Skittles learn from their first sour experience of social media, put some crisis management in place, and re-enter the community to rebuild the relationships that may have been damaged at their first outing on Twitter. At best I hope they hold their hands up and admit “Yup, we got it wrong.”