Marketing Pilgrim

The question was asked here yesterday by Joe Hall and there were as many opinions as there are colors in a bag of Skittles but as of this morning the jury is in. Skittles has taken down its site redesign reports MediaPost.

Apparently putting the brand and its message in a vehicle driven by consumers brings out the good the bad and the ugly.

The good was the fact that yesterday a lot of people were talking about Skittles. I have to admit that unless I am forced to I am not thinking about Skittles or writing a post about them. So to that degree this experiment certainly worked. Buzz was created and people were talking about the crazy colors of the Skittles rainbow.

Google has been making quite a few changes as of late. They have been halting development or simply ending projects like Google Notebook, Google Video and Google Catalog Search to name a few. All of these moves are perceived as efforts to contain costs and be frugal with the pile of Google cash that they have been collecting for years now.

It’s hard to argue with the effort. While Google has given its employees plenty of company time to explore new ideas they may now be putting that brain power to work to strengthen the existing tool set. Evidence of this is the announcement of the Google Analytics Individual Qualification (IQ). Analytics is one of the most popular and powerful offerings that the search leader offers to further put their hooks in their customers. It only makes sense that the better the understanding of this important tool would help Internet marketers and Google alike.

Yesterday rainbow-colored candy brand, Skittles launched a new web presence that has caused notice by many in the world of marketing and average web-head-geeks a like. The Mars-owned company gave their site a facelift of sorts that has left some in awe and others in shock.

Now when visitors go to skittles.com they don’t see the typical corporate branded site. Instead they get a fresh serving of social media. The home page is essentially an overlay of search.twitter.com displaying results for the term “skittles.” There are several other navigational features that Skittles has added to point users to other social media outlets such as YouTube and Facebook.

A session on the legal aspects of search and domains was an interesting addition to this years’ agenda. Moderated by Sarah Bird and featuring a selection of legal experts, a range of topics relating to search and affiliate marketing were placed under scrutiny.

Travis Crabtree – Looper Reed & McGraw, P.C

First up was Travis Crabtree. Travis outlined the 2 key criteria that must exist for a case to exist in respect to ‘misuse of Trademarks’. Those two things were either a use in commerce must occur, or that there must be consumer confusion. However differences did exist between California courts and those of New York.

Market research firm Netpop has released a new study today that suggests that social media is expanding at a fast pace. According to their findings social networking has increased 93% since 2006. This comes to no surprise to most of us that have followed sites like Twitter and Facebook that have seen unprecedented growth over the last couple of years.

However, one interesting statistic is that 54% of micro-bloggers post or “tweet” daily. Also 74% of the daily micro-bloggers are under the age of 18.

Apparently, 105 million Americans contribute to social media, but only 7 million are “heavy” social media users who connect with 248 people on a typical week.

Any words I type would not do justice to the awesomeness of this video. If you’re a Twitter user–or don’t understand what the fuss is about–grab a coffee and enjoy the next 5 minutes!

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