TamTamy Blog

Definitely radical, but surely with an impact and to be taken into account, is the move recently made by Skittles.com, the site of the coloured, fruit-flavoured candies.

Instead of using the social media on the market in a marginal way, or mildly integrating them into its pages, it has literally replaced its homepage with the interface of some social networks.

In the past days we discovered with surprise that, when you accessed the site, you found the stream of the messages on Twitter.

Now the skin has changed again, getting more similar to Facebook’s style and – just as it is on the most successful social network now – it is possible for all subscribers to become a fan, add Skittles to your favourites or suggest it to your contacts, sharing the information.

But this is not over. Through a control tool which appears in the front, it is possible to pass to the Twitter mode clicking on “chatter“; selecting “media” you can choose if you want to watch the photos on Flickr or the videos on YouTube; the “product” section refers to the pages on Wikipedia regarding the five types of candies on the market; finally, clicking on “friends“, you go back to the Facebook-like visualization.

Not bad, really, as a step forward in the path of the evolution of enterprise 2.0, which looks more and more to the final user and its potential customers.

It is a further confirmation that the integration between “social web” and “enterprise” is getting subtler day after day. What was reserved before only to consumers, now is contaminated by the presence of the companies, which merge and mix with the rest of the community, becoming part of its world and, in their turn, involving people, consumers and partners in a universe that used to be a long way off.

In few words: if you fall behind, you are lost.

Twitter is a microblogging service you can use to express your status and send it to one or more contacts through the site itself, a text message, emails, etc.

Since it was invented and launched in 2006 by Obvious Corp. of San Francisco, different applications have been created, based on Twitter’s APIs, which enrich its features making use of, for example, Google’s maps or creating widget desktops.

Twitter is a social media that easily meets consumers’ needs, but this doesn’t mean that it is not suitable also for companies.

It can be useful to create buzz around some news, for instance, and let the word of mouth spread once that one or more persons have re-twitted the post (that is, they have published it again).
Many companies are already using Twitter to promote the contents of their blogs or to simply make their news known. In this case, even more than in those we have already mentioned, holding the role of the expert, and thus also of the influencer, will be fundamental if you want the people of your community to find your tweets interesting and, as a consequence, decide to follow your updates.

Even if apparently it does not look like that, Twitter is a really valid tool to reach potential customers. In fact, a debate is in progress in these days, following the recent statement of its founders, who are thinking about adding a pay service for those who make a commercial use of it. In this case, everybody (and every company) will probably decide whether to keep using the social network in its free version or to pay a subscription in exchange for some additional features, as mentioned in Twitter’s official blog.