webponce rants

So, my thoughts on the new skittles.com.

From a technology perspective, its a VERY cheap way of aggregating your content or spaces in which your content exists. They’ve provided a navigation tool to show you around their activity in social spaces (flickr, facebook, youtube) as well as other people activity or conversations around skittles (twitter search).
The stand out piece is the twitter element – they’ve effectively just put a navigation on top of search.twitter.com for the keyword ’skittles’. In doing this, they show you any conversation with the word skittles that appears on twitter.

Now, when people started noticing this, they posted the word skittles and upon seeing their tweet appear, realisation that you could subvert the channel to make anti-skittle sentiment, or just down right nasty commenting (http://twitter.com/alexjohnwood/statuses/1269197448 for instance, NSFW), appear in a pseudo-endorsed way, this delighted/angered people in equal measure.

Of course, there is no way of moderating this conversation, and already other memes (skittlefisting for instance) have sprung up. The network effect of people talking about skittles made the word ’skittles’ start trending, and the growth became exponential, through a wonderful form of social feedback. The more people get annoyed/excited about it, the more people see it and do the same.

Skittles have made an interesting, brave play. On the one hand, they have first mover advantage. Whilst I’ve seen this ‘navigate over sites’ technique before (I seem to remember an agency who basically just showed you their wikipedia page, of course again ripe for editing), anyone who does something similar to this in the future will immediately be compared to (or worse, accused of stealing from) Skittles – never can this be done again in this direct model (at least until someone work out a spin on the concept). On the other hand the team at skittles must have known that it would have generated derision and swearing as well as just ‘general chit chat’ about skittles. Fortunately, the massive negative commentary will eventually subside, as people forget about the site, and generally people mentioning skittles in conversation will fall back to its normal non-influenced form, but by then, the site will have been seen by many, and its novelty/concept might have worn off.

It has, without doubt, brought Skittles to the front of many people’s minds though, and this is clearly at the heart of advertising – creating a spark of thought about a brand. Those who hate the idea of what Skittles have done are unlikely to specifically stop buying Skittles as a result. Those who haven’t had Skittles in the past few years might in the next couple of weeks be in a shop and think ‘Ooh Skittles, I just fancy some’, as a dormant memory of eating them in the past has been fattened by this activity. In rare cases, someone might even run out and buy bags and bags of the sugary beans right now.

In any case, it has already created gigabytes of conversation on blogs and twitter itself. I pretty much reckon we’ll be talking about it as an industry for a few more months yet too.

So, is it successful? Good? Rubbish?

Maybe only Skittles/Mars can answer that regarding their own commerical objectives for the project.
I’d imagine that a major KPI of the site would be to generate content and conversation.

Tick.

Update: I didn’t really write any personal opinion about the site, nor from a user’s perspective. Personally, I think the idea is quite simple and throwaway, and created a great deal of buzz – which in itself is excellent, however, did they create any social value for their users? No, probably not. But I’d also say it wasn’t a social media strategy – it was simply leveraging existing chatter channels about the brand, it is really a campaign idea, not a long term position on social media or interaction with their users. It isn’t interaction, its open backchannel broadcasting, its having a forum on your website, but not paying attention to it (nor moderating it). It falls short of really engaging WITH an audience, it is just making use OF an audience, hence missing the point of social media, but again, it comes back down to their objectives. If they wanted to engage their audience, they’ve missed a trick, but if it was about creating press and conversation – they’ve absolutely done wonders.

With my commercial hat on: Bravo!
With my user hat on: Eh?

Flickr image from arcticpenguin used under a CC License

I was in the audience for last night’s debate between Professor Jonathan Zittrain and Bill Thompson, on the subject of his new book “The Future of the Internet and what we can do to stop it“, hosted by Becky Hogge and the good people at the Open Rights Group. Having not read the book yet, there was fortunately a primer into his concerns over the “inevitable” reduction in freedoms we currently enjoy online, whether those freedoms come from threats such as malicious cracking, viruses and spam, tethered platforms, regulatory bodies or walled garden / happy valley situations like Facebook. Its a very interesting topic of debate, and I look forward to reading the book when the postman brings it next week. I can’t help feeling that some of Professor Zittrain’s points were a little ‘fear culture’ish to make people aware of the issues – in the same way that the instigator of the Y2K stories played up the significance of the problem to make sure it reached a wider audience (but of course turned into a media/social frenzy), but there is definately a great deal of truth in some of the points raised by both Bill, Johnathan and some of the questions posed by the audience. I’m not going to say anything more until i’ve read the book though, and he was an extremely interesting speaker – I can’t help thinking it will provide an interesting follow on from Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody which i’m reading currently.

As if by some form of perfectly organised timing though, RWW and the Guardian are running articles today about the public’s desire for some form of regulation into social networks like Facebook. I realised last night that regulation does not always have to mean restriction, and Sir Christopher Meyer of the PPC’s comment that “There is a need for public awareness about what can happen to information once it is voluntarily put into the public domain,” is absolutely correct, but I’m not sure that means OFCOM need to step in.

‘Public’ conversations in real life are aimed at the person or people you’re standing next to in your social circle and they can be overheard, but social norms mean we tend not to listen too intently to a mobile conversation taking place next to you. However, online, the flawless reproducability of digital conversations which also take place in this “public” arena added to the thought that a conversation online is therefore for “public consumption” make for bad juju. You wouldn’t photograph or record someone sitting opposite you on the train, but you might happily link to their twitter conversation, and that is quite a social disconnect. I think that might, in time, change, but whilst we’re learning new social mores to deal with this public/private dichotomy, self regulation is far more practical and relevant.

If you don’t want people to see it, don’t post it – even if you have privacy turned up to 11. That’s the rule. There are enough channels to privately get something from A to B without resorting to Facebook or similar, and that is about education. Teens are extremely savvy when it comes to privacy and posting on their social spaces, us adults are less aware. The Guardian article mentions journalists facebook doorstepping and whilst I can totally see how invasions of privacy are upsetting, if you’ve posted something on Facebook and haven’t considered who can access that, is that really private?

If regulation is placed on the social networks, it should be security focussed, imposing penalties for flaws in the code and the ability for crackers to get in and show supposed ‘private’ content, not user regulation.

Update: You can listen to an audio recording of the debate over at the Open Rights Group site. You might even be able to hear me ask about sewers.

I’ve mentioned on this blog before about barriers to entry for innovations like opensocial or openid – and how some things are just too technical to become interesting to the mainstream. here is something which is lowering that barrier – and possibly (until tonight) the most anticipated 404 page i’ve ever bookmarked – http://www.google.com/friendconnect.

FriendConnect promises to offer social tools through basic embeds and snippets of codes, allowing content developers who aren’t necessarily the most technically savvy, to still enable their site with the power of social networking.

David Glazer, a director of engineering at Google, explains “Many sites aren’t explicitly social and don’t necessarily want to be social networks, but they still benefit from letting their visitors interact with each other. That used to be hard. Fortunately, there’s an emerging wave of social standards — OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, and the data access APIs published by Facebook, Google, MySpace, and others. Google Friend Connect builds on these standards to let people easily connect with their friends, wherever they are on the web, making ‘any app, any site, any friends’ a reality.”

Watch this, and many other spaces.

A new product from the innovation masters, Schulze and Webb, supported ably by my good friend Amy T. and her team at BBC Audio & Music Interactive R&D.

Olinda is a prototype digital radio that has your social network built in, showing you the stations your friends are listening to. It’s customisable with modular hardware, and aims to provoke discussion on the future and design of radios for the home.

http://schulzeandwebb.com/2008/olinda/

Succinctly elegant as ever, Clay Shirky talks about why participation is the revolution

As twitter increases in users and awareness in the mainstream, more and more people are asking ‘yeah, but why?‘, more so than many other arguably less useful services. I’m not sure why so many people need a definitive answer to use what is such a simple service to join. The Guardian’s Jemima Kiss sums it up best I think:

There are so many possible uses for Twitter. It’s a very functional group messaging service – if your ten closest mates were signed up you could say ‘I’m in the pub’ and would only have to send one message instead of paying for ten. And you could also use it for more creative projects, something I’d like to explore when I clone myself and have some time to do ‘art’ outside of all-consuming work time.

The real point, though, is that we should all be a little more willing to explore these tools without feeling the need to classify it or nail it down to some definite function when it is still so young. So many inventions were born out of a completely different idea; vinyl records were a spin-off (no pun intended) from a project for talking dolls or some such… It’s far easier to dismiss something out of hand than to be open-minded, creative and playful.