Ultimately though, I feel Skittles has fallen short of the mark. It’s not that people can see the negative comments, but because they’re not contributing to the online conversation with anything but a new conversation monitor. The “Buzz” they generate is purely about being able to do what you already can do with a simple search – but with the added step of going to the Skittles site. Therefore, traffic to their site is more for novelty purposes rather than brand engagement. If you’re trying to drive conversation, return visitors is the metric, not unique visitors.

I think this is just one in a million experiments going on with the phenomenon that is social media, and, while it’s bold, I wouldn’t call it successful. They don’t really push the envelope – they put a fancy stamp on the envelope and call it new media.