Blog Accelerant
By Albert Tan, Senior Brand Strategist - November 3, 2010
These days, it seems every company has (or is planning) a person or division focused on “reaching out to the community” or “being part of the conversation” through tools such as Twitter and Facebook. Countless books, experts, and even entirely new agencies have sprung up around “social media” to help companies understand – and take advantage of – this new movement towards thinking about and doing marketing (and business) differently.
Yet despite the shining successes out there, what’s discussed less often is determining if and when leveraging social media makes sense for your brand, and more importantly, what the underlying POV should be to help craft an initial approach.
Blog Accelerant
By Albert Tan, Senior Brand Strategist - April 20, 2009
In recent years, the increasing proliferation of the web as a social medium has led many to believe you can no longer control your brand. Customers today have countless, powerful outlets to shape, edit, criticize, and even completely hijack your brand, so it is no wonder why this can cause great concern for companies large or small.
Blog Accelerant
By Albert Tan, Senior Brand Strategist - March 17, 2009
I recently stumbled upon Skittles.com, the official website for those brightly colored ‘taste the rainbow’ candies I’m sure almost all of us have tasted at some point.
The most interesting, perhaps groundbreaking, aspect about this site is Skittle’s decision to almost totally relinquish and hand content ownership over to its customers, by leveraging third-party, social media –driven websites. I’ve never seen anyone else embrace “turning the brand over to the customers” so deeply.
The Skittles.com homepage loads the product’s Wiki entry (update: the site no longer does this, and instead loads their YouTube page), with a Skittles-branded floating window. Clicking on Media (Video or Pics) brings up the respective YouTube or Flickr pages, and Chatter takes you to their Twitter site. In all of these examples, the only Skittles brand indicator that ties these together is a floating navigation menu that sits on top of everything.
The only content branded in the traditional sense is the Product and Contact areas, as well as a bit of customization on the YouTube page, which incorporates the Skittles visual brand identity.
So – from a brand and user perspective, is this a good or bad thing? And more importantly, does it even matter?
