Is there a pot of gold at the end of the skittles rainbow?

There is, and has been, an awful lot of chatter about the skittles digital campaign that's currently underway which is predominantly focused on the use of Twitter. There's more to come from this campaign, so this post might be a bit premature but I wanted to get my thoughts on a post at this point because I think that unless we have "the big reveal" soon, it's going to die off.

If you haven't heard of it, Skittles has essentially changed it's entire website to pull in content from Twitter, Facebook (which features the game pictured to the right) and Flickr. So, the landing page actually features all the twitter chatter about the campaign, which is quite substantial given that the campaign is in full swing and there's a lot of buzz around it. The website also includes some fairly standard product info, a few videos and some pics - which really aren't that special. According to some of the tweets on the feed, the website is actually a copy of Modernista's site and after taking a look, it could be.....then again modernista could be working for Skittles.

There are a couple of posts floating around about the campaign that aren't that complimentary about it, pointing out the exposure of the brand to negative comments (and there have been a few) and the fact that they aren't actually interacting with their audience, breaking the first rule of the social web. But.... I think there's more to come and they have hinted at it on their Facebook page:

Skittles wroteYesterday, at 16:39
Thanks for all your thoughts on the new site. I know there are some lingering questions out there: will they twitter back? Is this site real? Am I causing that smell? Stay tuned for answers to those questions and more. We promise.

MyTake - This campaign hinges on what happens next and I for one am quite excited about what that might be. There's so much chatter around this already, so there's a lot of buzz around the brand which you'd think would spill over to mainstream media, making it a success from a PR/marketing perspective on two fronts. But they need to start interacting pretty soon in order to capitalise on the buzz, or risk losing the audience that they worked so hard to build.

YouTube gets Flickrd

News is that Flickr is going to go up against YouTube and start hosting their users' home-made videos in addition to their pictures. You might not think that this is overly exciting at all, but when you think about the way that people use flickr to share content across a whole range of social networks and blogs – it kind of is.

The new development is aimed at amateur movie-makers who want a better way to share their content with others. Although it’s only available to Pro members at the moment, the service allows users to share movies up to 90 seconds in length.

MyTake – the point I’m trying to get at with this is that publishing is becoming so simple, that anyone can become a content-king. With the addition of video to the ever-popular Flickr, people have another choice when it comes to video sharing. This enables them to offer a richer experience to their readers - whether that’s their facebook friends, loyal blog readers or Mom and Dad back home.