Skittles moves onto Networking

March 3rd, 2009

Skittles.com is now nothing more than a navigation box floating over the Twitter search results for the term “skittles.” Essentially, this is capturing all the Twitter conversations regarding their brand (and their new marketing tactic) right on their homepage. Click the the Friends button, and the nav will float over their Facebook Fan Page. The Media button floats their nav over their YouTube channel.

“Skittles” has been the number one search topic on Twitter and in social media since Sunday, and as you might expect, most commentators love it. It’s bold, innovative and its helping drive word of mouth regarding the Skittles brand with people who love to share ideas.

The company has been criticized for abdicat[ing] their brand voice and failing to filter the feed, resulting in competitors links, profanity and some unsavory tweets from pranksters.

Whether the failure to filter was intentional or not, I don’t know, but by not filtering visitors get to see the authentic conversations regarding the brand. Still, all tweets aren’t suitable for children.


Facebook V Twitter

March 2nd, 2009

Facebook’s stalled attempt to buy Twitter, it seems, hasn’t dampened its appetite for acquisitions.

Peter Thiel, one of the social networking company’s largest investors and a director on its board, told BusinessWeek that Facebook is still on the lookout of deals.

“We’re still focusing on growing as much as possible,” he told the publication.

As for the failed Twitter deal, Mr. Thiel told BusinessWeek that talks to buy the microblogging service fell apart due to disagreements over over price and structure.

“It became pretty clear it wasn’t going to happen,” Mr. Thiel, who runs hedge fund Clarium Capital, told the magazine. “The deal would have to be done with Facebook stock. And then you have to figure out how much the stock is worth.”

Last fall, reports surfaced that Facebook offered Twitter 3.33 percent of its stock, which it had determined was worth $500 million, based on a $15 billion valuation for Facebook that was set when Microsoft invested in the company a year ago.

But, BusinessWeek said, Twitter balked at the Facebook valuation, knowing that Facebook was letting employees sell stock on the secondary market at company valuations ranging from $2 billion to $4 billion.

“We said it’s not worth it,” a person close to Twitter with knowledge of the negotiations told BusinessWeek. “Don’t treat us like children.”

In December, however, Twitter chief executive and co-founder Evan Williams, didn’t rule out that a deal could be rekindled some time in the future.

“We explored it, as we should. We took it seriously,” Mr. Williams at the time. “It definitely made sense – the strategy we talked about with them – but it wasn’t the right time.”


Google’s hour of fame!

February 5th, 2009

It was the weekend which shook Google to its very foundations… possibly. All around the world, users of the search engine which prides itself – and has built a multi-billion dollar business – on providing the best, most useful answers to every query were greeted with a message warning that “this site may harm your computer”.

The same text was pasted next to every search result – for everything from Aardvarks to Zoroastrianism. In effect, Google was warning users that the entire internet was sick and shouldn’t be touched with an electronic bargepole.

Panic spread as the global web community told each other about this apparent breakdown. Google eventually fixed the problem, explaining that an update of a list of malicious sites somehow ended up including every web address, instead of one specific URL. But what a textbook example of a corporate disaster allowed to rage out of control…

…hold on a minute. The entire incident lasted just 55 minutes. And if you were on the West Coast of the USA, where Google is based, you are unlikely to have been affected, because it started at 0630 your time on a Saturday morning and was over by 0725. So why all the hoo-hah?

Well, news spread like wildfire around the blogosphere – or more accurately the Twitterverse – as everyone seemed determined to pass on their panic, along with rumours that Google’s Gmail was also misfiring. So far. more people knew about the “may harm” incident than were affected by it. I got off a plane on my way home from a holiday on Saturday afternoon, asked online whether I’d missed any big tech stories, and was bombarded with messages about the Google crash.