Have you seen the new skittles site?
Skittles made a widget at the corner of the site, and built the navigation around that. This menu-overlay box allows the user to interface with their already existing social networks, thus allowing for the candy brand to spread through the normal daily actions of the user. It’s working, I love skittles, and I totally made it a fan on my facebook.
Instead of photos, it directs to their Flickr page. They hooked ‘Chatter’ to Twitter. Instead of the normal everyday about page, they hooked it to Wikipedia. It’s a social networking rainbow!
There are still some quirks to this campaign. The menu overlay blocks a lot of the content on my smaller laptop screen. Also, originally they used the homepage as their twitter search, but everyone was using it as a way to knock the brand (haters) so they switched it to their Facebook fan page. This comes with the territory when you allow anonymous users to run the content of your website.
Overall, it’s a lesson in how important the big sites (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and Wikipedia) are to major brands and how they will continue to change the way we market.