Skittles' new social media un-website experiment

Skittles just launched a new un-website that is simply a navigation block in the upper left corner overlaying various social media websites related to Skittles. The landing page is the Wikipedia entry for Skittles. Other links include Products (Wiki pages on specific products); Video (YouTube); Pictures (Flickr); Chatter (Twitter); Friends (Facebook).

The site borrows it's concept from Modernista!, but the Skittles has been lauded for being the first major brand to launch a website that fully embraces the concept that companies don't control their brand image, but rather must be active participants in the conversation that are continually shaping and reshaping their brand in the public consciousness.

The origins of this idea can be found in the Cluetrain Manifesto, which has been promoted for many years on the social web. At first it was a novel, even revolutionary, concept that markets are conversations, which corporate marketing departments have little control over.

However, the introductions of an un-website from a major CPG company like M&M Mars clearly demonstrates that at least one large corporation has understood and accepted its role as a participant and sometimes guide in the online conversation about one of it's products.

Putting marketing theory aside, the Skittles site itself is slightly awkward to view, because the navigation box is large and blocks out the upper left portion of each website visited. The navigation can be minimized, but just expands again as soon as the user go to another page.

The current initial landing page is the Wikipedia entry for Skittles, which was chosen after the Skittles Twitter page got raunchy on launch day. There are still a continuing stream of questionable posts running across the Twitter page. I quickly glanced at the Chatter page and noted a number of posts from a user named FuckCity. This uncontrolled nature of the content streaming across Skittles.com necessitated the addition of an annoying pop-up that requires users to enter their age before entering the site.

In sum, the Skittles site is an interesting and brilliant marketing experiment that has already generated huge acclaim and hundreds of thousands of fans and followers of the Skittles brand across the social web. The online world will probably reward the next few copycats of the un-website concept, but eventually this approach is going to get rather tired. Can you imagine if every website was just a link to the same five social media websites?

While the Skittles experiment does not represent the future of the homepage, there is no doubt that we are going to be seeing a lot more integration of social media elements in the websites of major companies. Skittles.com is surely just the beginning.