This blog post first appeared on blogs.fco.gov.uk on 06 March 2009

There’s been a lot of chatter about the new Skittles website in the last few days. You can read about it in detail elsewhere. But in a nutshell, Skittles replaced their corporate website with a simple widget that directs readers to relevant user generated content on leading social media sites, including Wikipedia, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Flickr.

You would have to have been a real Skittles enthusiast to have visited the official website before. I really don’t know what you’d expect to find on the corporate website for a packet of sweets. So on this level the makers of Skittles have delivered a public relations triumph: They’ve done something novel > lots of people are talking about Skittles > more people will probably buy some Skittles. 

But there’s something more interesting in this if the makers of Skittles have decided that there’s no longer any point delivering official lines on a shiny corporate website.

Of course, we all know that people don’t respond well to marketese on the web. And that web users often value the opinions of other web users far more highly than the opinions of corporately employed web editors. eBay and Amazon recognised this ages ago and put user generated content at the heart of their web content.

What Skittles appear to have done is go a step further and do away with almost all their corporately edited content, relying entirely on user generated content to present information about their product.

This may just be a PR stunt (or a clever market research tool), but I think it highlights some interesting challenges to the way we think about corporate websites and digital campaigns.

In the Foreign Office – as elsewhere – we have recognised that user generated content often has more value that officially drafted and cleared content. That’s why we’ve partnered with Yoosk on our London Summit campaign, it’s why our bloggers encourage comments, and it’s why all of our digital campaigns involve an element of reaching out beyond our own content.

But the Skittles approach suggests that maybe we don’t need a web platform at all to deliver digital campaigns. And that we may not need to employ any of our own web editors. After all, content has always been king, and maybe the most engaging and accurate content is being provided by amateur authors, using whatever social media they find most convenient.

If our “editors” can use the combined content management systems of Wikipedia, YouTube and Delicious, then maybe we don’t need to invest in content management systems of our own.

And maybe we don’t need to host and manage our own websites at all any more in order to deliver digital campaigns. This could solve the UK government innovation v domain rationalisation debate. As well as putting a few digital agencies out of business.

Right, I’m off to redirect the Foreign Office website to the Wikipedia entry to see if anyone complains.