Skittles: a great idea in need of a strategy?

The new Skittles' global .com site (skittles.com) has garnered a huge amount of coverage over the last week. For those that haven't seen it yet the site has little content of it's own (simply product & content information) and instead uses iframes to publish content from Wikipedia (for the Skittles brand and company information), Facebook (the Skittles Fan page), Twitter (showing all live tweets containing the word 'skittle') and YouTube (a Skittles's channel showing advertising and user videos).

It's not unique - Modernista was playing with this a couple of years ago (modernista.com) but it is the first time that a brand has put it's global site in the hands of its consumers.

And yes, that's brave. It really shows a brand team understanding the fact that, in the world of Web 2.0, not every aspect of the brand can be controlled and managed.

Sure, there have been hiccups this week. Initially Twitter was set as Skittles' home page. However, the unfiltered feed started to contain significant amounts of bad language. Most recently the majority of feeds appeared to be marketing and sociological comments (with links to numerous blogs) on the brand strategy - rather than consumers actually discussing the product. So the home page has changed to the Wikipedia entry for Skittles.

But nevertheless the site has received an enormous amount of PR and publicity from the strategy. As Mashable says "Skittles is basically saying: "We get it. Whatever we can do cannot be as awesome as what you guys and girls can do, so we'll just link to it and let you do your thing".

So as an idea it's generated a large share of voice online. But is there really a longer term brand strategy here?

For starters to view the site the consumer needs to state their date of birth (presumably there is a minimum age restriction - but that's not made clear) - so for a youth brand a large proportion of its consumers are potentially disenfranchised from entering - unless they lie about their age - simply because bad language/adult content could be contained in the UGC.

And there are technical issues with the site. It's not accessible (it requires the Flash plug-in and there is no HTML alternative). From a usability perspective the floating menu system obscures the screen and readability of the content behind.

But the biggest issue is simply this - what exactly is the longer term strategy? Ok, consumers may come today based on the hype. But what's going to bring them back? And when they are on the site - are they having a brand experience that builds brand equity or are they participating in a social media experiment?

Time will tell.