mattyford.com

I am posting pretty late in the game on this one, but Skittles have recently implemented a new overhaul to their website that essentially does the opposite of traditional strategy - completely remove the website and replace it with their Social Media presence. This experiment is a pretty gutsy move by the brand, but one that seems to have generated huge buzz and success.

Essentially, if you go to the Skittles homepage, you now access a Skittles “Channel”. After confirming your birthdate and the Terms of Service, you are directed to a default page (their YouTube channel), while a small widget in the corner lets you navigate to areas of Social Media for the brand, such as their Twitter feed, Facebook page, or Flickr page.

What this means is they have completely removed a Corporate Website, and have now leveraged their entire web presence into Social Media tools, letting consumers drive the content and provide comments and feedback. From Twittering about the your love for the product, to posting photos, or commenting on their amazingly random videos, consumers are now driving the dialogue and creating a community of like minded individuals.

This may be the most impressive thing about this new strategy - essentially Skittles are only a candy, but have found a way to create a massive amount of free PR and engagement online that has generated a massive amount of awareness (and a huge amount of talk of the Internet). 

Will this be the death of a traditional Corporate Website? Probably not, as any brand to follow this model probably won’t capitalise on the huge amount of free press that followed Skittles move. But they should be applauded for trying a bold, aggressive experiment in the Social Media landscape.

Getting good quality Inbound Links is an important way of improving your websites SEO. But how do you find out what sort of links you are currently getting to your website?

The easiest and fastest way is to use a search engine. Simply go to Google, and type the following into the Search Box:

site: mysite.com

(With “mysite” being the target URL you are searching. Make sure to keep a space after the colon).

This allows you to see what links are coming in, or the kind of links other sites are getting such as your competitors. Try searching for an established website in your industry - if they are receiving links from a free directory or listing, you should aim to get on them straight away.