After the sensational Skittles campaign launched on Twitter by Mars this year, some revealing truths have emerged about social marketing that I have suspected for a long time.

It was mathematically impossible to avoid, we just had to wait for it to happen. There was one big ripple effect spawning a series of ripples. When the sensational Twitter fest occurred, we saw certain ripples that were positive about the brand and others that were negative.

It didn’t really matter – they just wanted to see how many ripples they could make. It’s like staging a train wreck. We know the outcome will be messy yet we are compelled to watch. Some folks seemed genuinely concerned about how others were reacting and judging the campaign. Who really cares how people are judging this? In fact, the people who talked about it the most were the people doing the judging. I believe the objective was all about talk and the buzz and they accepted the ripples good or bad.

Controversy has always sparked conversation dating back to the early days of PR. It has worked for celebrities and other brands offline in the past and this experiment was no different.
The big question that was raised at the end of all this was, “did it help them sell more candy?” I don’t believe that was the intention. Being the most talked about candy in the world and getting tons of free press with very little effort and relatively low-cost was clearly the goal here.

There was a method to this madness. I tend to believe that Mars, being a major a conglomerate, chose this brand deliberately knowing that the risk would be minimal. The argument was made that they missed their target altogether. Perhaps that too was deliberate. Damage control would be virtually a non-issue if their young customers were not so affected by any possible backlash or criticism.
The phenomenon of “brand surfing” or what is classically known as coat-tailing also emerged from this experiment.

This was more of a wave than a ripple as many Twitter influencers and wannabe influencers rode this wave for their own benefit and buzz. Yet again, this was a non-issue because they all became brand affiliates instantly, regardless of what was being said. This will happen again and again and I think it will work better for some brands than others. Whether this tactic will sell more products or not remains to be seen.

The hottest thing on the media buying circuit these days is using Twitter feeds in ad placements. These are Ad units on websites that will display updated tweets from a branded Twitter page. You can have multiple hot spots in the ad unit but the most obvious click-through of course is to the Twitter page where all the Tweets for the brand can be read. This is a relatively cheap and viable solution for offering brand content through a paid media placement.  Or is it?

You still need to employ a copywriter to write all the tweets. You may also need to employ an auto-tweet service to randomly re-tweet from a stock-pile of twitter content. You still have to pay for the ad placement. The only place you are really saving money is by virtue of having a free Twitter page to launch this micro-content from – right?  Well, if you signed up for a free Blog account such as WordPress, Tumblr or Blogger, you would get even more functionality and you could still write posts in under 140 characters.  What’s more, for very little cost, you can have your own branded domain on any of these free blog services.  You can also just as easily feed your ad placement from your blog posts.

So what’s in it for brand when they use Twitter as opposed to just using a blog? Not much, other than driving traffic to Twitter on the brand’s dime in the hopes that those visitors will be interested enough to only stay on the branded Twitter page.  The risk of course is that visitors will wander and explore other Twitter pages and eventually forget about the page that brought them there in the first place.  So again, why not brand a blog and at least get visitors focused on your brand?

It all depends on your objectives. If your brand is trying to funnel traffic to a product site, your media dollars are better spent keeping visitors focused on a consistent brand experience rather than bouncing them through Twitter. If your goal is to try and garner more brand awareness through Twitter, keep in mind that on the initial click through, it’s Twitter that is getting the payoff. In order for a brand to reach its ROI on such an ad placement, you have to bet on a percentage of users continuing their journey to the brand’s website.

The moral of the story: Feeds to ad placements are a great idea. Consider carefully where you launch your feeds from and where the payoff will be.