UPDATE:
Apparently people jumped the gun and Skittles, in fact, didn’t take their site down, they just moved some things around. Either way, my point remains about understanding the difference between customers and community. Enjoy…
Dear Skittles,
Rough day? To begin, I really hope you saw this coming. It would be insanely irresponsible for Agency.com to not make you aware of the huge potential for “backlash” that you’ve seen in the last day or so. Only, it may make you feel better to know that what you saw wasn’t “backlash”. Backlash is what happens when you change your position in a relationship and that new position has an adverse effect.
The reason this wasn’t backlash is because a relationship between yourself and these people never existed. What you saw was the primal human instinct of testing limits. Without that relationship, people will play nice only for so long, and then they’ll start to see how far they can push it until it’s broken forever. It’s probably a good thing that your new “website” was taken down when it was, because I can assure you that it would have gotten much, much worse.
Here’s some free advice (maybe this is for Agency.com as well if they truly were surprised by this outcome): There’s a significant difference between customers and community. Customers are people who give you money because they like what you have to sell. Community is a group of people who give you their time, energy and loyalty for free because they feel that if your brand was a person, they’d be friends.
While the number of customers you have may sit comfortably in the double-digit millions (maybe triple!), do you have any sense of how many people are part of your core community? That is to say, people who truly care about your brand on a personal level, beyond calling your fruit-flavored morsels their “favorite”. I’m going to throw caution to the wind and guess that number is close to zero.
Don’t get me wrong, I think your company puts out some really amazingly weird and funny advertising and that certainly gets people talking. Unfortunately, by never being part of that conversation you never had a chance to build an ounce of trust with your customers. Building trust-based relationships with your customers are the seeds of growing a community.
The silver lining is that you’re in a good position. People like you. You have a good product. Your customer-facing brand presence through your advertising keeps a positive conversation going. The first step you should be taking is starting to get involved in that conversation. The misstep was putting the cart miles before the horse, though I don’t blame you. However, there’s probably a few people you know that you could throw a shoe at.
Sincerely,
Jeffrey Kalmikoff
Skittles Wild Berry Enthusiast
4 Comments
Completely agree.
IMHO
Agency.com would have been more effective if they showcased flickr photos on their homepage.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/skittles/clusters/
Nice post Mr K.
When this ‘campaign’ was first pointed out to me I got the impression straight away that who ever was responsible hadn’t entirely thought through what they wanted to achieve.
I get a kind of sense that Agency.com put this idea forward on the premise that “Hey guys you know whats cool? Facebook & Twitter” and didn’t put enough overall thought into how they could make it work in their favour.
I wonder if in all the preparation the word ‘community’ even came up?
Nice work, Jeffrey. I like the bit where you define and contrast ‘customer’ and ‘community.’ So true.
P.S. The content-covering, floating menu on their site also sucks.
P.P.S. Have you tried the Skittles Chocolate Mix? Weird, but pretty good.
I didn’t see what people were tweeting, but I see sites like that as an incredible opportunity for people to jump in and be dicks. The internet is full of terrible people who like to drag down your site for fun. Their relationship to Skittles (or whoever left the door open like that) was customers or consumer is totally irrelevant.
For example cable news has started opening up its ticker to tweeted messages – they have editors filtering stuff before it hits the air but really offensive stuff gets in anyway. Somebody will always try to use the platform for their distracting prank. If word gets out that there’s an opening, lots of people will get on board.