In case you missed it, the official skittles website located at Skittles.com last night redirected their entire homepage to a twitter search for the term [skittles]. I applaud their effort to embrace bold new ideas but their execution leaves a lot to be desired. I thought I’d run through some of them in hopes some of you might learn something:
- Use a NSFW filter to keep porn, racial slurs, or just plain rude and obnoxious comments of the stream. Twitter has one and used it during the presidential debates.
- Add a leet speak filter again they need to filter out more more NSFW terms. Additionally use regular expression to filter out use of periods, spaces and dashes for NSFW terms.
- Use a competition filter, don’t publish mentions of snickers, Mike & Ikes, or any other candy.
- Filter out link drops, the potential for links to Goatcx, tubgirl or lemon party is too much (looks them up on your own if you don’t know what they are, be warned NSFW).
- Filter out any scripting or HTML just to be safe.
- Limit the number of times someone gets posted to once every 30 to 60 minutes. This will cut down on the likelyhood someone will fins a hole that lets bad info get through.
- Don’t replace your product pages with wikipedia pages, pages that anyone can edit are too much of a target for people to mess with.
- Keep as much of your existing web structure in place, don’t 301 or 404 it, having a massive sitewide shift like that isn’t a signal of quality to the search engines.
- Leave some content on the pages for the search engines and don’t use an H1 tag with over 50 words in ok?
- Grab all of your trademarked names and play with the community. I personally grabbed @skittlescandy for them so a bad person didn’t (hey skittles reach out I’ll get that over to you).
Lastly I’m going to take the position and call this is a WIN for skittles. Like Motrin did in the Motrin Moms “scandal” they will take hit and look like weenies in the eyes of the techno elite for some critical and 100% preventable mistakes. However in a few days they will be bathing in the mostly positive after glow of trying something different, getting a ton of attention, and a ton of links … so I say WAY TO GO SKITTLES!
For other viewpoint see
Skittles: Tweet the rainbow (or racial slurs)
Skittles Site Receives an Extreme Social Makeover
The New Skittles Website Is A Twitter Search For “Skittles”