Social media and viral marketing are now just about, if not more crucial to any business who has an online presence. Mars Inc’s move to change the way we think about a brand website is quite impressive and if not ingenious. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s basically just a network of lots of different social media websites, including YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, Wikipedia and others.

When you go onto the website, for some reason, which I haven’t quite grasped yet there’s a form which asks you for your age, it’s not like they’re selling alcohol or anything. Any ideas anyone? After that there’s this annoying little frame that’s placed over the page which you can’t move around, it contains links to product information and so forth. You can minimise the box, but it is still annoying when it gets in the way.

The centrepiece of the new Skittles website.

Some links are drop down – it’s like a 50 / 50 mix. Home just takes you to Flickr with images of Skittles, Products is drop down with Wikipedia links as pages, Media is drop down with Pictures and Videos – Flickr and Youtube respectively. On the bottom line we then get chatter, which is Twitter (surprise, surprise), Friends is Facebook fans and Contact is just a plain old contact page hosted on their server.

There’s a few questions that spring to mind for me about the whole website after looking at it:

1. It’s a good way of pushing bandwidth away from their servers – the people going on their website are only loading 1 page, but what do the social media hosts think of it?
2. What if one of these websites goes down? It’s unlikely but technology does fail, so what then? Just dead pages?
3. Something that annoys me is that they don’t explain it well enough, so someone who isn’t tech savvy or doesn’t understand or use social media might find themselves lost, how do they begin to explain how to use Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Wikipedia, and Flickr all in one concise “read me”?
4. There’s also a little box that appears telling you that you can exit the website at any time, but while it’s up you can’t follow any of the links which is quite annoying, why? Surely people can figure out if they want to leave the site they just do what they normally do?

Questions need answers, but I’m afraid that I probably wont get them. There’s another issue though, the mobile website. So many people talk about the mobile web these days and it’s crucial for a brand like that to have a website that works on the mobile web and works well, unfortunately, they haven’t really nailed it. Below you can see the 3 stages on an iPhone:

Skittles Mobile Homepage - it doesn't fit the screen

Click on a link, it opens a new page in the browser

Then there's no way of getting back to where you just were, from that page. Lack of consistency.

If I’m honest, when I heard about it, I was overall, quite impressed. It was one of those moments when it’s so simple it’s unbelievable no one else has done it before. I even posted a Tweet on Twitter about it I was that impressed. I suppose it’s a way for a developer to save time but still make lots of money.

It’s quite a bold move really and I’d like to try and follow it and see how it plays out. I mean, will it promote the brand, or will it just be a failed attempt to sell an old product? I’m going for the first one, considering it’s kicked up a bit of excitement in the web dev and social media world, what do you think? Can you see anyone else doing the same sort of thing? Let’s just hope for Mars Inc’s sake that it pays off. One thing’s for sure though, it’s never going to beat the retro advertising they did back when TV was at it’s peak: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfkT5SIH4gI