This morning anyone who visited the Skittles Brand homepage (www.skittles.com) was probably a bit surprised to find themselves suddenly on Twitter.  With a new slogan “Chat the Rainbow” Skittles linked their homepage to the Twitter search results for Skittles

Its generating a lot of buzz – and prompted everyone on twitter to try to get onto the skittles homepage by tweeting something about skittles.  Pretty brave when you think about it, with apparently no means of moderating the tweets Skittles has opened the door for open communication on their company homepage.

We like the idea…its a great PR stunt – get people talking about your brand in a completely new, trendy and different way.  However there is real potential for this plan to backfire.  First of all, Skittles isn’t active on Twitter, neither is its parent company Mars.  For a social media strategy to work long-term it’s got to be a 2-way conversation, which isn’t happening at all here.  What they’ve done is pull up a stream of anyone using the word ‘Skittles’ in their tweet.  Because of this there have been a few incredibly inappropriate tweets showing up – including offensive language and links to ‘adult’ sites.  Furthermore, what happens when the initial “wow” factor wears off and people aren’t tweeting about skittles every second?

Skittles also should have thought about the Fail Whale a bit before launching this.  Twitter, although getting better on this front, is notorious for not being able to support the amount of traffic it draws on a regular basis.  Especially with all the buzz surrounding this…is it worth relying on Twitter to keep your homepage up and running?

It’s a great PR stunt, but is it a good social marketing strategy?  We’re not sure…