Remember the Skittles.com Experiment? Here are the results. | Hacker News Reader

Remember the Skittles.com Experiment? Here are the results.

siteanalytics.compete.com

13 pointsbreck12 comments

Well, duh.

Do something weird with your website, especially involving something as viral-able as Twitter, and your page views go way up. But, as far as I know, Skittles does not make its money off of page views.

This isn't even granular enough to show if it's been going up even after the initial web talk about it or if it's on its way back down or even if that's right after they did it.

The true "results" would be sales data.

Everything you say is true but you do have to admire the simple brillance of the whole thing.

They basically outsourced 99% of their web page under the guise of "embracing Social Networking" and got all kinds of attention and praise for it.

I don't know how much that little flash overlay cost them to make but I'm betting they got at least 1,000 times the marketing value out of it.

No, it's not all that admirable. It's nice, but I see nothing to "admire" there. And I don't think it's "brilliant" either.

It's easy to get eyeballs. Microsoft could get a million visitors right now by replacing their homepage with a black screen with a smiley in the middle. The question is, do they benefit from these eyeballs? I don't see that Skittles will.

"The question is, do they benefit from these eyeballs?"

This was essentially the theme in Branding is for Cattle, an interesting book, which examines the idea of getting "known", and what leads people to take the next step where a business actually profits.

> The true "results" would be sales data.

I would suspect the sales bump from the traffic increase wouldn't be enough to show up as significant on the Skittles' radar. However, I personally bought 4 packs of skittles last month. Which is 3+ more than usual.

I think what's interesting about this is that Skittles has next to no traffic(40k a month for a year), so they said "let's roll the dice", and suddenly they got half a million visitors. I like that kind of thinking.

Now if we could only see how many skittles they sold because of this?

Obviously brilliant-- but more in a kinda gritty 'only works once' way. Like the reaction I had when I first saw the million dollar home page: A little ill, but mostly just mad I didn't think of it first.

This is phony. The real question is what the traffic looks like next month. I'd say it's likely it'll drop right back down to what it was.

I just wish they sold the rainbow here in Brussels :-(

http://skittles.com/chatter.htm

Skittles nailed it. They embraced social media and that is going to start a trend from here. I'm glad our startup is going to be venturing into this space.

After the last 3 years, the one thing I've come to despise more then the phrase "web 2.0" is "social media consultant".

I'm all for companies adopting new tools and being transparent. But the amount of hyperbole used to communicate technical advancements to mainstream companies bothers me.

"Social media consultants" are the snake oil salesmen of Twitter. I try to avoid it, but there's so damn many of them.

Also, recently I've been noticing a bunch of people peddling MLM and other get-rich-quick schemes. It's quite annoying.

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