Web

The non-blogging, non-podcasting, non-wiki part of the World Wide Web.

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Death Watch: Feeds are important, but widgets still work

Twitter and Facebook’s rising popularity have altered the online habits of more than a few people. Given the volume of information that comes our way through the tweets and status updates of those we follow, many are now convinced that the news finds us.

Certainly I discover a lot of interesting news by way of shortened URLs embedded in tweets, and the recent use of Twitter to direct Central Texans to the site of a hospital treating victims of the Fort Hood shootings exemplifies the ways Twitter increasingly is being used as a news delivery vehicle. But given the speed with which tweets fly by, I’m bound to miss a lot of news if I’m not watching my monitor at just the right time. To get a comprehensive overview of the news in which I’m interested, I still need other channels.

These other channels include widgets, which continue to thrive despite a growing chorus insisting that the web widget is dead.

The argument for the demise of the widget is best articulated by Socialvibe president Joe Marchese, writing on MediaPost. Marchese writes,

What marketers need to understand is that the feed killed the widget. Feeds, like Facebook’s news feed and Twitters status update, have made the portability of content nearly irrelevant.

The web, in Marchese’s view, is a world of people “programming content for friends, co-workers and total strangers,” one in which a destination (like a website) is increasingly irrelevant. A marketer’s goal, he says, is to get people to program your branded content into the information they’re feeding to others via their tweets and Facebook status updates.

I agree with Marchese—to a point. But, does this mean the widget is dead? Hardly. In fact, with startups like Sprout building entire businesses around widgets, building and maintaining high-quality widgets has become easier and cheaper than ever. The only question seems to be whether anybody will ever again visit a web page where these widgets are housed.

If you buy into Marchese’s assertion that the feed has killed the widget, then you believe that traffic to destination websites is trending to zero. There’s no question that unique visits to destination sites—even those that historically have done the best job of attracting traffic (think Nike, for instance)—are declining. But the loss of thousands—even tens of thousands—of visitors still leaves sites with thousands—even hundreds of thousands—who still drop by. As attention shifts from static sites to the real-time web, some attention will continue to focus on sites. (If the widget is dead, then isn’t on-site advertising dead, too? Don’t tell sites like TechCrunch or any of the top mommy bloggers, who seem to be getting enough page views to be profitable with advertising.)

Traffic to traditional sites is declining, not disappearing. There will always be reasons to visit a destination website even as most of our attention shifts to content produced through social channels.

Consider tweets that contain a shortened URL. That URLs takes you somewhere, often to a blog post or a news story. That content appears on a web page, and on that page you can find all kinds of other material that may serendipitously reveal even more content in which you were interested. After all, the blog’s theme guided the blogger to write the post that motivated someone to include it in a tweet, so why shouldn’t the material that orbits the blog’s posts—including widgets—be equally interesting?

Marchese’s post also assumes that widgets contain only the kind of content that is now communicated via tweets and status updates. A widget I created contains an audio player that, when activated, presents the latest episode of For Immediate Release, the podcast I produce twice weekly with Neville Hobson. So you click a shortened URL in a tweet, follow it to a web page to read the recommended post, and while you’re there you see this intriguing widget with an audio player. Curious, you click the play button and are introduced to FIR. Many of our listeners have shared FIR with people visiting their blogs by embedding the widget on their sites.

Widgets can also contain video, images, contests, fundraising activity (the American Red Cross has made excellent use of fundraising widgets during times of natural disasters), polls, and all manner of other content. They can serve a variety of purposes, like the fundraising/CSR widget below (feel free to embed it on your site):

It doesn’t even take a shortened URL to bring someone to a web page. Despite the fact that there are multiple channels through which our community can listen to FIR, our statistics tell us that most people use the Flash media player directly from the FIR website. Why not provide additional communication-related resources for them to look at while they’re there? Knowing that people do visit our site gives us the ability to provide them with more relevant and useful content they can serendipitously discover—and maybe even embed on their own sites. Then there’s the Twitter widget, letting people who visit your site know about your Twitter activity and, possibly, resulting in the addition of one more follower.

And then there’s Facebook, where many people go to read their feeds. Services like Sprout make it as easy to create and deploy a widget for Facebook as one for a standard web page.

Marchese is right about the trend toward feeds, but there’s a vast difference between disruption and destruction. There’s no doubt that newspapers are in decline, but more than half a million people still subscribe to The Washington Post, and the Post has the fifth largest subscriber base in the U.S. With millions and millions of people still reading paper newspapers, it makes no sense to abandon them as a means of getting your story out. With hundreds of millions of people still viewing websites, it makes no sense to abandon them, either, as a channel for reaching people.

Ultimately, widgets work. They’ve been widely adopted and they have tremendous reach, according to ComScore numbers analyzed by Terra USA Research:

It’s worth pointing to the widely reported decline in traffic to Twitter; use of the site dropped 27.8% from September to October, according to Nielsen, leaving the service with 18.9 million unique visitors. While many of those are influencers, it’s still a fraction of the total online population. Widgets can still prove useful in reaching the rest, whether they’re reading blogs, websites, or Facebook.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that much of the buzz around widgets has to do with the nascent market for interactive TV widgets and widgets on mobile phones.

And it’s more than a little ironic that Marchese’s post proclaiming the death of the widget was accompanied by two common blog widgets—a “related articles” widget and a “most read” widget.

Are you using web widgets and, if so, do you continue to derive benefit from them?

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Death watch: Static destination websites

I understood Jonathan Schwartz’s enthusiasm when he suggested, during a talk a couple years ago, that a Sun Microsystems intranet really wasn’t necessary with so many employees blogging. It still didn’t make any sense to me, though. Would it really be easier to find benefits information on employee blogs than on an intranet benefits page? And how, exactly, would an employee enroll for benefits on a blog?

The same kinds of thoughts cross my mind as I hear all the claims that static web sites are dead. The rise of social media and the real-time web has certainly shifted the focus of the online community. There is no question: The era of the destination website is ending, if it’s not already over.

But we’re talking about the end of an era, not the death of a tool. The era of the destination webiste has been one in which organizations pumped most of their online efforts into their dot-com sites; their strategies were focused on driving traffic to those sites. With the time people spend online shifting to real-time and social content, companies do need to rethink how (as a post on digitalbuzz put it) they deliver digital experiences to their customers and other stakeholders.

This is one of the reasons lifestreaming could become important to business. A company can publish many forms of content to one place, which in turn distributes it to appropriate channels: photos to Flickr, videos to YouTube, commentaries to Twitter, and so on. Microsoft is the first business I’ve seen to launch a Posterous lifestream for its new retail stores. The site owners easily send photos from their phones to the site, where they can in turn be added to a Facebook fan page or just about anywhere else.

This doesn’t mean Microsoft has no need for a destination website, however.

The use of a tool is based on the use to which it’s being put. Yes, a lot of content that has been cloistered on company dot-com sites will—and should—shift to distributed venues where people are spending their online time. But there’s still a need for static content that’s housed in one place. I can’t imagine a time when that need will vanish.

When seeking certain types of information, people will continue to go directly to a company website rather than hoping they can find it somewhere in the social web:

• Contact information
• Investor resources
• Product/service listings
• Company history
• Jobs

In fact, the static company website has a new purpose. More and more organizations are using their website as the home for a directory of links to their Facebook pages and groups, Twitter accounts, blogs, Flickr streams, and YouTube channels. Why hope people will stumble on your content when you can direct them to it?

The idea that the social and real-time web will completely kill off static sites is hardly strategic. Far too many organizations are still focused on driving traffic to their dot-com sites, which will become an increasingly frustrating and unrealistic goal. But having those sites available when they prove to the best resource for the kinds of information to which they lend themselves will remain a pillar of a company’s online presence.

Friday, August 28, 2009

Revitalizing StopBlocking.org

With only so many hours in a day, I have to choose where to commit my energy. As a result, some projects take a back seat. But after pondering two sets of data, I’m recommitting myself to my Stop Blocking initiative.

But it won’t do any good if I do this by myself. I need help to keep the wiki updated.

Bear with me, and I’ll explain all.

First, the data

By themselves, both of these sets of data are intriguing. Juxtaposed, however, they’re startling. One one side, you have organizations warming up to social media, particularly as a channel for marketing. On the flip side, you have a surge in companies that are blocking their own employees’ access to social media.

Add to the mix the fact that internal social media—also known by names like enterprise web 2.0—is gathering steam, and you’re faced with a genuine conundrum.

Let’s review these stats, starting with business embracing social media. According to Equation Research’s “2009 Marketing Industry Trends Report,” reported by eMarketer, 59% of brand marketers use social media, and the ranks will swell to 82% in the next year. A mere 13% claim they have no plans at all to jump into social media marketing.

This data reinforces the results of other research, like a study from the Association of National Advertisers that shows 66% of marketers have used social media in one form or another this year.

Returning to the Equation Research study, the results indicate that only 7% of companies don’t see social media as a good use of employee time.

Clearly, the companies surveyed by Equation weren’t the same ones analyzed by ScanSafe, which earned a boatload of free publicity when it released a study reporting a 20% increase in the number of companies blocking access to social media in the last six months.

So, companies want to market through social media but they don’t want their employees using it? First, that means employees will have to go home to participate in their own companies’ efforts. And second, if everybody follows suit, the total pool of consumers engaged in those marketing efforts will plummet.

But it gets more interesting when you look at the results of the Nielsen Norman Group‘s recent study, “Enterprise 2.0: Social Software on Intranets: A Report From the Front Lines of Enterprise Social Software Projects.” This in-depth research revealed that social software adopted by companies that produce significant results are nearly always introduced as under-the-radar grass-roots initiatives by front-line employees. That is, once social software efforts prove their worth, the powers that be push their implementation.

Let’s be clear: Employees who are not permitted to innovate with social media will not be able to introduce beneficial tools to the enterprise, ultimately costing these companies in untold ways, from innovation and collaboration to increased market share and profitability.

Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman group nails it:

Social software is a trend that cannot be ignored. It is bringing about fundamental change to the way people expect to communicate with one another. Companies cannot use social tools with their customers and not also allow their employees to utilize them.

Yet, according to the data, that is exactly what’s happening.

So let’s summarize:

• Companies want to market using social media.
• Companies rely on employee grassroots efforts to identify social media that will pay off internally.
• Companies are blocking employee access to social media.

Is it just me or does the math just not add up here?

And now, the call to action

I started Stop Blocking a few years back out of frustration over the knee-jerk reasons company denied employees access to social media. The blog was meant to provide updates on research and news items related to the topic. The wiki was designed to provide an archive of resources people can use to make a case against blocking in their organizations.

There has been plenty of evidence to add to the wiki which I have neglected. For example, there’s the University of Melbourne study proving a 9% productivity increase among workers allowed to use social media at work. Or there’s the BizInfo/Blackline study that revealed 65.3% of business professionals claiming that web 2.0 services help them to achieve business objectives and 78.1% who believe social media increases collaboration among employees.

I’ve written extensively about this elsewhere on this blog and over at StopBlocking.org. I’ve catalogued and attempted to debunk the reasons companies implement blocks. None of them hold water in light of the evidence of the real business benefits that accrue to organizations that prudently allow their employees access to the Net. I could go review all of these, but this post is already running long enough.

I will add the latest studies to the wiki. I will cross-posting this item to the blog. And I am committed to getting back to maintaining the blog. But I need your help.

What can you do?

• Send me resources—When you find a study or survey that either related to employee use of social media, blocking access, corporate policies or anything else that helps build the body of knowledge, please send it my way.
• Link to StopBlocking.org—The only way this initiative will build into a movement is if it’s visible.
• Put the badge on your blog—There are several versions available.
• Share success stories—Blog about the benefits of access to an open web in the workplace, and let me know so I can link to your posts.
• Make the case—Use the information at StopBlocking.org to make a solid business case for open access in your organization.

Monday, August 10, 2009

Your homepage is your homepage

These things are true:

• If your website domain isn’t instantly intuitive, people will go to a search engine to find you
• If people are looking for companies that do what your company does, they will go to a search engine to find you
• As people conduct searches about your organization, they’ll find what has risen to the top, whether it’s positive or negative
• With increasing regularity, people visit destinations other than standard websites when trying to learn about an organization

I get all that. And yet I am increasingly irritated when I hear someone utter this nonsense:

Google is your new homepage.

This phrase produces more than 8,500 results in a Google search, mostly blog posts exhorting companies to embrace this belief. Yes, search in general and Google in particular are vitally important. But your homepage is your homepage.

At the risk of sounding pedantic, let’s remember that a homepage is defined as the opening page of a web site. Your index file, not Google, is the opening page to your web site. But this is a bigger issue than just a formal definition.

While the era of the destination website may be over, the corporate website is far from dead. The notion suggests that destination website no longer dominate the customer’s attention online. They once did, mainly because there wasn’t much else online to see. Now, with social networking and online video dominating people’s attention, the importance of the destination website has diminished.

That only means traditional websites are now part of a bigger mix of options online, not that their usefulness has vanished.

The 2009 Trust Barometer from Edelman reiterates that a company’s own website is one of the most credible source of information a company can provide about itself, beating business blogs, social networking sites or advertising. Only corporate communications—such as press releases, white papers and emails—ranked higher, and only by a two percentage points. And while searches of Google News and Yahoo News ranked higher, searches of the core Google search engine didn’t even make the list. At the very top of the list you won’t find any new media at all, but rather the staid and traditional industry analyst report, reinforcing the high levels of trust people place in third-party experts.

Certainly, consumers may glean information that doesn’t help your company’s cause when searching Google. In fact, according to one study, search engines are the most common way consumers find opinions about products, brands and services. But if they’re looking for what you have to say, they’ll still click through to your website, and most often the top search result will connect consumers to your homepage.

Your website is also the home of the static content that still serves a purpose. The bio of your CEO, shareholder information, details of your corporate social responsibility efforts, archives of your news releases (your authoritative statements of record), job listings—all these represent details people need.

And search engine optimization, which has become a core corporate activity as the importance fo search continues to grow, is still about enabling discovery of your content on your site. As this Google-as-home-page notion gains currency, I fear people will spend less resources on the maintenance of their websites—an odd dilemma, since one SEO fundamental is to continuously update your website and infuse it with new content.

Still, according to a study just released today, web content managemente has fallen as an intrinsic component of organizations’ communication efforts. While social networking is part of web-based communications for about 72% of organizations, web content management is an activity among only about 53%. That’s particularly odd given that the study found SEO is an activity at nearly 70% of organizations. What’s more, web content management is declining as a skill companies look for when making a PR hire.

That is, more organizations are optimizing their sites for search than are managing those sites in order to ensure that the sites offer value to those who find them, despite the fact that corporate websites are among the most credible communication a company can produce.

That’s a huge disconnect.

SEO, along with social media engagement, are critical, but let’s not lose sight of the basics as we embrace new media. SEO is a critical skill and companies must do it well. But your homepage is still your homepage.

Thursday, August 06, 2009

Sorry, Rupert, pay walls won’t work. But thanks for playing.

Since Rupert Murdoch announced his plans to eventually charge for all of his newspapers’ online content, a number of opinions have surfaced about the feasibility of the pay wall and the reasons it won’t work.

For example, a MediaPost item by Wendy Davis (free subscription required) suggests that enough people who pay for the content will share it in violation of the publisher’s terms that the content will get out anyway. Others note that for every news site with a pay wall there will be plenty of alternatives that remain free.

From my perspective, the issue isn’t about whether the online content offered by news organizations have any value. Clearly it does, despite all the hand-wringing over “content wants to be free.” (Stewart Brand, remember, said in the same breath that “content wants to be expensive.”) It’s more about the discoverability of the content and the value per article.

The primary difference between the content news organizations publish on the web and that which they publish anywhere else—even if it’s just a repurposing of the same content—is the difference between pull and push. And once you understand that, you understand that it’s all about the package.

Non-web content—whether it’s in print, on TV or aggregated in an email—is pushed at you in a package. I subscribe to The Contra Costa Times. It shows up on my driveway every morning, held together by a rubber band. The newspaper has sections—Sports, Business, Time Out, Morning Report—each one with articles and features that I discover as I methodically turn the pages. I’m not paying for one columnist or one type of story or one set of box scores. I’m paying for the package.

Nobody subscribes to The New York Times just to get David Pogue’s column. (Well, maybe his mom.) Pogue’s column is one of the features you look forward to when you consume the Times.

The same is true of news on TV. It starts at 7 p.m. and ends at 7:30 on the major networks, beginning with the top news and moving through features and commentary. On cable, there’s also a collection of stories contained in the package. If the most interesting item on “Countdown” is the story that starts at 5:40, you just have to wait 40 minutes to get through it (which is fine since the stories preceding it are probably of interest to you, too).

With the pull dynamic of the web, things don’t work that way; the package is so much less important that it’s a non-factor. Too many people ignore the front page of the newspaper website, opting instead to make Google News or Digg or their RSS aggregator or Twitter’s trending topics their front page. Or they see a link tweeted by someone notifying their followers of an intriguing news story.

Or, you like just the David Pogue column; it’s the sole reason you visit The New York Times site.

In any case, it’s the individual items that attract attention.

(On a side note, it’s truly a scary thought that the pay wall will block individual news items from being collected in these third-party channels, isn’t it? How counterintuitive would it be for the only way to find that the story exists at all is to pay your admission fee and slog through all the links on a newspaper site’s home page?)

So I find a link to a story through any of the 10 or 15 channels I use, click to it and discover that a subscription is required. Will I pony up $9.95 per month for every one of the 20 to 30 news sites I wind up visiting? Not likely. I’m not interested in accessing the whole site. I just want the one story, the one column, the one feature that brought me there in the first place. And I’ll skip it before I subscribe.

After all, I only get The Contra Costa Times in print. I don’t pay for subscriptions to 15 or 20 other newspapers. It befuddles me that Murdoch and other publishers think we use the web the same way we use print.

That’s not to say I wouldn’t pay for access to news content, but the news business needs to introduce a new model that just doesn’t exist yet. I’d gladly pay $9.95 per month for access to any news content, with some kind of collection agency—a kind of ASCAP for news organizations—divvying up the proceeds and distributing them to publishers using a formula based on the volume of visits to each of their sites.

Given the results of the recent VSS media study, which shows people are spending more time than ever with paid content, I think an approach like this could work.

But as long as each publication plans to assess a discrete subscription fee to gain access to any of their content, this plan will fail. It has nothing to do with whether the publishers deserve compensation, or whether the content has value. It simply has to do with finding a model consistent with the way people use the content. A monthly per-publication subscription fee isn’t it.

Monday, July 13, 2009

Imagine a web without links

Repent, all ye sinners. The end of the Web is nigh.

Well, okay, that may be a bit extreme. But when you consider that links are the Web’s foundation, a disturbing trend doesn’t bode well at all.

Consider these two news items:

• U.S. appeals court judge Richard Posner wrote last month that expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted material, or to bar linking to copyrighted materials, without the copyright holder’s consent, may be necessary to keep a viafble newspaper industry alive.
• The UK’s Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) is pursuing a plan that would require payments from anyone linking to their member newspapers’ online content. In fact, PR agencies would be charged for emailing a link to a client!

Both of these stories (which, by the way, Neville Hobson and I covered in today’s episode of today’s FIR) are worthy of commentary, but I’m more concerned about their collective impact. As more and more organizations seek ways to stop others from linking to their sites, or force payment in exchange, the value of the Web could decline precipitously.

This is serious. You can’t shrug it off by wondering how anybody could be so stupid as to want to reduce traffic to their own sites. Clearly, protection of copyright is a higher priority to some organizations than traffic.

I used to get this question from clients all the time, back in the early days of the Web. “Do I need to get permission to link to content?” I did my reseach, even asked lawyers, before I answered. Case law up to that point said that any content you put on the Web is subject to linking. From a linking standpoint, every page is equal; every page is the equivalent of a home page. If you don’t want someone to link to it, don’t put it on the Web or, at the very least, password-protect it.

As for the notion that copyright was violated by linking to copyrighted content, the courts—with a few narrow exceptions—found that links were not violations. After all, the content resides on the copyright holder’s server. All you’re doing is pointing people to that content.

What if all cases brought to court wound up like these two:

• A decade ago, U.S. District Judge Tena Campbell ordered Mormon church critics Jerald and Sandra Tanner to remove links from their site to copyrighted Mormon text.
• Three years ago, U.S. District Judge Sam Lindsay granted a preliminary injuction against Robert Davis, who provided links to live audiocasts of motorcycle racing events copyrighted by SFX Motor Sports.

It would be devastating to the prospects of a useful World Wide Web. Google, which indexes all Web content through automated spiders, could be liable for search results that point to copyrighted content. The same would be true of Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines.

But that’s not the scariest part. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) maintains its Hatewatch blog to keep “an eye on the radical right,” specifically neo-Nazi, racist, anti-Semitic and other hate groups. Imagine the courts telling these groups they could no longer link to such sites because they didn’t get permission from the copyright holder! (I can just hear someone from the SPLC calling the grand wizard of the KKK and saying, “Our blog keeps an eye on assholes like you. Can we have your permission to link to your website?”)

The case of Robert Davis isn’t nearly as momentous, but consider that a Firefox Greasemonkey script that automatically turns any link to an MP3 file into an embedded MP3 player. SFX Motor Sports sued Davis because people could listen to their audiocasts directly from Davis’ page, which means they never saw the ads or other associated content on their own site. What does that mean for anybody with the Greasemonkey script? Could they all be at risk for any MP3 file visitors could play directly from their sites?

The more you peel back the layers of the onion, the more questions arise. What about links people leave in comments to blog posts? What about shortened links to copyrighted content from Twitter and Facebook?

This is a no-brainer. Hyperlinks are to the web as cables are to a suspension bridge. No links, no Web. If copyright extends to links to content, then the value of the Web—not to mention searches of the Web—will diminish precipitously.

There needs to be more outrage over this trend, and a more coordinated effort to put a stop to it.

Friday, March 06, 2009

About that Skittles site? Let’s all take a deep breath…

A couple of days have gone by since Mars, Inc.‘s Skittles brand tossed out its website and replaced it with links to various social media properties. So frenetic was the commentary that I decided to stay out of it other than a mention on Monday’s episode of For Immediate Release. But I just can’t keep my lip buttoned any longer.

Most of the declarations that the experiment launched by Agency.com has failed are based on the flood of obscene, racist, and otherwise tasteless tweets Twittered by the adolescent set as soon as they learned that their juvenile output could be seen on the Skittles website. These messages run counter to the brand and therefore the whole exercise was just a big mistake.

MediaPost’s Jim Sterne has gone so far as to claim that Skittles has pulled the plug on the site. I’m not sure where Jim got his information, but as of 30 seconds ago, the site is still upa nd running. I suppose he could be talking about the Twitter search page no longer being the default landing page, but my understanding was that the brand intended to cycle through the various pages. The Facebook fan page was the landing page for a while yesterday. Today, it’s the Wikipedia entry.

And the Twitter search page remains linked to “Chatter” on the navigation bar, producing all the same filth it was displaying before.

In light of the awful things people are posting, why would Skittles not pull the plug on this experiment? It could be that the powers that be believe that no publicity is bad publicity—and Skittles has been getting a boatload of publicity. I even saw a tweet this morning from someone who noted that all this Skittles talk led him to buy a pack when he was seeing “Watchmen” last night. So you can argue that the publicity is actually having an impact on sales.

I take a longer view, though. There is, in general among the social media crowd, a tendency to pile on when a company tries someething risky, despite the fact that most of the same people believe that the worst risk a company can take is taking no risk at all. The attacks suffered by Dell in the first days following the launch of its blog remains a classic example, considering Direct2Dell has become a poster child for effective customer service-focused blogging.

Six weeks from now, the idiots who are inclined to put their idiocy on display by tweeting obscenities so they can see them on the Skittles site will have tired of the game or forgotten about it altogether, having moved on to some new diversion. That will leave the page with only legitimate Skittles-focused tweets.

You may wonder if there will be any legitimate Skittles-focused tweets. That’s why I ran an advanced search on Skittles from January 1 through February 15, and as I scrolled through the results, I found 18 pages of tweets—and that was before I got beyond February 14. That means there were thousands of Skittles tweets before Mars launched its new Skittles site. And I haven’t seen one that was deliberabely provocative. Here’s a sampling:

So maybe those brand people at Mars actually knew what they were doing. While not every tweet from before the launch was G-rated, the brand is clear that it won’t market to anyone under 13 (which is why you need to enter your birthdate before accessing the site), and there’s nothing among these tweets that a 13-year-old hasn’t heard before. But the fact is that there’s a lot of genuine, unprompted Skittles chatter.

There also are half a million fans on the Facebook fan page, which boasts a lot of activity.

As Todd Defren pointed out in his post, “As Social Media grows in importance — as a trend and as a SEO influence — a brand’s curators must make it their mission to HIGHLIGHT and SHARE the best examples of user-created, brand-relevant content… and either engage or ignore the tricksters and haters.”

I completely agree. But does that mean this was the best approach for Skittles to take? I might have relegated all of these pages to a single “What People Are Saying” link on a more traditional website. MediaPost’s Sterne suggests that the brand folks didn’t pay attention to the customer. I can’t tell you whether they did or not, since I’m not privy to the internal discussions that led to this experiment. Surely one of the most important questions asked would be:

“Why do people come to the Skittles site?”

...followed by:

“What story do we want to tell to people who come to the site?”

So let’s take a stab at answering these questions:

What would bring people visit the Skittles site? While some might be looking for nutrition information or some other facts and figures (all of which is contained in the Wikipedia listing), I would guess most people go to a site like Skittles.com because somebody says, “You gotta see what’s on this site.” And that’s exactly what people were doing earlier this week when the revamped site was unveiled.

What story do we want to tell people who come to the site? I can easily imagine the branding folks sitting around a conference table saying, “The story is that Skittles is more than just a candy. It’s a community. The people who eat Skittles are cool. They mix it with vodka. They eat it and have sex. They turn their friends onto it. And they talk with each other about all these things. You want to be a part of this community. You don’t want to be left out!”

And if that was, in fact, the story they wanted to tell, I would be hard-pressed to come up with a better way to tell it.

But as I’ve noted so often in the past, the damn site has only been up for a few days. Let’s see how it moves the needle after a month or two before we start passing judgment.

Right. As if.