Skittles and Social Media

The new Skittles.com redesign is an interesting approach to creating a website. It take social media to the extreme!

Every link you click on leads you to popular social media website. The products page now points to their Wikipedia, their media page takes you to YouTube and Flickr, Chatter takes you to a Skittles Twitter search, and Friends take you to Facebook.

The longer I sit and watch the Twitter search page refresh itself, the more I think this is a bad idea. Any mention of the word “Skittles” on Twitter gets displayed on the website. And since this is a candy company, I think it should be more geared towards children more right?

The website does ask you for your birthdate before you can enter the website. I put in a date that would make me 5 years-old. Since I’m too young, the only thing that gets displayed is “No Way, Jose. Unfortunately you aren’t eligible to visit the site” yet, the Twitter stream still refreshes in the background! A simple fix to this is to display the YouTube page or something else instead. But honestly, I think they’re targeting the wrong audience for their website..

Although Twitter is slowly hitting the mainstream, not everyone knows what Twitter is yet. So the new website would appear quite confusing for a majority of visitors.

Read more:
Skittles Site Receives an Extreme Social Makeover (Thanks for the link @mayhemstudios!)

Skittles – Taste the Revolution? (Thanks for the link @djsteen!)