ChasNote

This is all a little embarrassing to watch. A few days ago, Skittles turned its homepage over to a live Twitter feed that pulled any Twitter post that mentioned “skittles.”

At a high level, I love the idea: Your brand is what your customers tell their friends about it. But your brand is not what someone who may or may not be a customer tells his or her friends about a pet named Skittles. Or racist slurs that somehow work in the word “skittles.” Skittles has apparently abandoned the Twitter idea; its homepage now points to Skittles’s Facebook page.

I agree with David Berkowitz assessment in his Mediapost column in which he critiques Skittles for building a marketing idea around a platform that its customers aren’t using:

“Highlighting Twitter Search in particular seems absurd, especially since Twitter tends to skew older relative to other social media properties, and Skittles seems to target a younger audience.”

Another mistake — see pets named Skittles and racist comments on the Skittles.com homepage — is that Skittles opted not to curate or moderate the conversation. I’m not recommending censorship. If certain Skittles eaters don’t like the green ones, hey, so be it. That’s part of the conversation. But there’s no place in the Skittles conversation for hate speech (or random pet names, for that matter).

A final suggestion. When you’re trying something new, consult with the experts. If you’ve never been to a dinner party, you might read up on Emily Post’s etiquette tips. If you’re new in Twitter, learn from the most successful participants in the Twitter conversation. I don’t know if Shaq or Lance would respond to a direct Tweet asking for some advice, but I bet Pete or Zappo’s CEO would.

You’ll improve your success odds if you start by listening.