The Skittles Super-Mashup: Taste the Social Rainbow

Mars, Inc., is taking a brilliant new approach for their Skittles brand’s public website. By creating a mashup of popular social web applications, they have essentially relinquished control of their public website to the people.

On the new skittles.com, the only part of the site that is actually from Skittles is a small navigation menu at the top left that floats above the pages. The navigation is just six items: Home, Products, Media, Chatter, Friends, and Contact.

The Home and Product links load the Wikipedia entry for Skittles. Media loads special Skittles Flickr and YouTube pages. Friends loads the official Skittles Facebook page. Perhaps the most daring page is Chatter, where they load a Twitter page with ‘skittles’ pre-populated in the search. This pulls every post from Twitter that has the word ‘skittles’ in it, good or bad. The Contact page seems to be the only one that isn’t using content from a social site.

There are several thoughts I have about their site. Above all, they are showing strong confidence in their brand. They believe in their product well enough to use content they have no control over. Technically, it’s very simple for them to maintain. All that comes from their servers are pages with their navigation and an iframe to load the content. This also means there’s very little content they need to maintain themselves. Their biggest challenge is to promote and maintain the social and viral awareness of their site.

This approach to web development is definitely not for everyone, but I believe it works for Skittles. While Skittles is technically only candy, it is also an experience that has been built through decades of advertising. Now, that experience is being built by everyone.