I got a copy of David Meerman Scott’s newest book “World Wide Rave“ this past week and hunkered down to immerse myself in it over the weekend. I first heard David talk about his “Six Rules of the Rave” when he spoke at the New Media Marketing Summit so I was more than anxious to get all the skinny from the book in greater detail. David didn’t let us down with this much awaited follow up to his previous #1 seller, “The New Rules of Marketing and PR.”
As so often happens, you learn something new and then you can’t stop seeing ‘it’ everywhere. I think you’ll find this to be the case with all of David’s writing. On Saturday I read through most of the book, including rule #3, “Lose Control.” Then today I read several re-tweets on the new Skittles Social Media web site strategy (Go to the Skittles candy web site to check it out.)
What the Skittles web team has done is created a set of div layers that float above a web page and those pages are served up as the content of the site. This doesn’t sound too earth shattering until you realize that the links are to pages that OTHER people have created through social media sites … the content is NOT created by Skittles. For example;
- Photos of the product are served up by Flickr.com
- Chat streams are served up by Twitter.com
- Videos are served up by YouTube.com
- Friends of Skittles, of course, congregate in FaceBook.com
- Product history is served up by Wikipedia.com
Sadly, the Skittles legal team had their say by requiring users to enter their date of birth and that you know the content was not created by Mars Snackfood US, LLC. The idea, however, still truly conforms to David’s rule #3. Skittles has completely relinquished control of their web site content to the social masses. They trust their brand can weather any negativity seen in these other networks and that the benefit of participating in the networks will FAR outweigh the risk.
BRAVO SKITTLES! Your bravery makes you deserving of the Rave Wave you’re riding right now!
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