For the last 24 hours all anyone could talk about, good or bad, was the new Skittles site launch. If you head over to the Twitter search page, you can track what everyone is saying in real time. The topic is so hot tonight that it’s on the main page for daily trend results:
- #bachelor
- Jason
- Molly
- Harlem Heights
- #journchat (side note: good hash tag for pr/marketing people)
- Melissa
- #skittles
- #24
- Watchmen
- #heroes
There are a couple really good posts (here and here) out there that talk about what’s going and start to gauge the success or not so successful lanuch. At the very least, at leats people are talking about Skittles.
Yes, right, at the very least, people are talking about skittles. But what’s it going to do for their sales? An initial incremental boost? And if so, will that incremental boost cover the cost of the agency fees for this campaign? For Skittles’ sake, I f**king hope so. Nevertheless, I somehow doubt it.
It’s almost as though all these social media campaigns are more geared toward hiring a hip and savvy agency. Geezus, like Skittles needs to say “we worked with these guys.” And how do these agencies pitch? “Dudes, we’re like ‘on the in’ online; a brand like you has to be hanging with cool kids like us.”?
If I had to pick being talked about and not talked about for trying something “new”, then I would pick being talked about. Whether the sales are going to increase or not is another issue all together. I agree that the increase may not be what they hope for.
I was never one of the cool kids in school, so I don’t know what it’s like being in that camp. If all these companies only care about hiring someone hip and cool, then the agency and or company is going to go out of business due to lack of sales in the long run. You can’t keep spending money and not have any money come in from the campaign.
I think a lot of companies are just doing the social media thing to be cool and maybe some agencies are taking the business so they can say they did something in relations to social media. In the end, both are going to fail for not providing anything of value to the audience. Once companies start asking agencies how they plan to measure success beyond being talked about then we’ll start to see some real business get done.
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