Archive for March, 2009

Twitter and Skittles: An Experiment in Open Social Branding

March 2, 2009

In what may be a first from a major brand, Skittles has begun experimenting with integrating community comments and inputs into its online presence via Twitter Search and RSS feed.

The Skittles.com website has become a mashup of the brand and its community’s Tweet stream.

I am not sure what the short term or long term implications will be for the brand, but one thing is for sure this particular mashup approach is innovative by any definition.

Skittles.com

Skittles.com

In exchange for participating in the new Skittles.com website, visitors are asked to simply provide their birthday.

Skittles Audience

Skittles Audience

I suspect by day’s end with this simple request Skittles will have a more clear idea of who their online audience is vis-a-vis their average age.

Seems Skittles should have also asked whether their visitors were male or female – unless of course Skittles assumed the majority of their online visitors were going to be male.

The new Skittles home page still has a navigation box in the upper left hand corner where visitors can reach the brand’s website.

Taste The Rainbow

Taste The Rainbow

After being on the site for a while I received the following dialog box:

Return to Skittles Home Page

Return to Skittles Home Page

Unfortunately, I wasn’t ever able to reach the traditional Skittles.com home page from my Mac with  Safari or Firefox browsers.

I guess I will have to Tweet my experience with the new Skittles.com website on Twitter.

February 2009 WordPress Blog Traffic Stats

March 1, 2009

This blog: Search Marketing Communications generated its seventh highest month in terms of traffic during Febraury 2009 with 6.059 views.

Previously, this WordPress blog’s highest trafficked month was September 2008 with 22,897 views.

Approximately 27% as many views occurred during February 2009 as compared with September 2008.

Why the drop in traffic?

Because I switched this blog from a WordPress.com domain to my own private domain on January 28th and it has yet to get crawled and re-indexed in Google under my new domain name.

The vast majority of traffic this blog received in February 2009 came via search engines to posts written several months ago. Not a single one of my posts from February received any search engine referrals.

WordPress says it could take as long as six months for this simple change to recognized and acted on by Google.

If you are considering switching your WordPress blog to your own domain, you might think twice if you are looking to get search referrals anytime soon after the switch.

By the end of February 2009, searchmarketingommunications.com had been viewed 119,422 times since its launch in September 2006.

In its first month of existence this blog had 1,593 total views.

February 2009 traffic was approximately 4 times greater than September 2006 traffic.

Few people subscribe to this blog, thus the vast majority (an estimated 99% or greater) found this blog through some type of search query, which is why this blog is titled:

“Search Marketing Communications”

Search Traffic February 2009

Search Traffic February 2009

Third Largest Month Blog Search Traffic: 10,154 Views

February 2009 Total Blog Traffic

February 2009 Total Blog Traffic

Total Search Traffic February 2009