Holy Mess Over the Rainbow - the Future of a Corporate Web-site

Skittles has taken a small step for a candy, but a giant leap for a CPG brand web-site. A click on skittles.com will not take you to a corporate home page in a traditional sense, but instead to Skittles on Facebook. The only thing that has the functions that we have become accustom to on brand web-sites is a small widget in a upper left corner. Clicking on listed products will land you on a product Wikipedia page, so even this is very Social Web.

The rest of the clicks on the widget categories will take you respectively to these: Pictures - Flickr, Videos - YouTube, Chatter - Twitter, Friends - Facebook. So it's all good, somewhat messy, but still good. When I say messy I'm talking about little things that make up the big picture. For example if you search for Skittles on Twitter, you'll end up with 43 results and there's no way to tell which is the actual brand among them. I finally settled for these two - @skittlesrainbow that has 0 updates and @skittles_com that has 126 updates all of them going like this "I'm a Skittles master... get a free Netbook only for Skittles USA/Canada: http://tinyurl.com/bl3yeg #skittles". Not sure which is worst.

Still, is Skittles showing the way for the rest. Is this the future of a corporate web-site? Let's not forget the risk factor that comes with earned media - the social media - the uncontrollable media. For Skittles this undertaking is pretty low risk. When was the last time somebody opened a package of candy and was so disappointed with it's contents that it stayed with him or her for years. At the same time I still remember when an airline refused to let me board a plane with my kids at 6 in a morning. The younger one was only two at the time. Let me see if I can remember the airline, well there's no way I can forget that. SAS.

So here it is. Is this the future? Is this the solution? Is it worth the risks? I think it could be . Even when a Brand drops a ball and really screws a customer and the customer posts all his negative emotions on the brands Facebook wall, it will give the brand an opportunity to engage in a dialog. Not an easy thing to do, but it's better than watching and hearing all these conversations from a sideline.

What do you think?

NB! Oh yeah the picture is one of the results from the Twitter search.