Lessons from Skittles for poets and activists: part 1 now posted on The Seminal!

A few weeks ago Agency.com and Skittles kicked off “Interweb the rainbow”, a brilliant marketing campaign that involved multiple social networks. The idea was simple: replace the Skittles.com home page with different social network sites. Late that Sunday evening, they set it up to show everything that people were saying on Twitter about Skittles. Everything, good, bad, or indifferent.

On Monday, Skittles was the #1 topic on Twitter.

By Tuesday, there were zillions of blog posts as well as positive presss in the Wall Street Journal, LA Times, the Financial Times and Advertising Age.   Gender differences in response to Skittlemania has oodles more links.

…

In this series I’ll discuss what activists can learn from the Skittles experience — and poets, too, for reasons that’ll become clear in the next few days.

More here, on The Seminal.

Thanks to everybody who gave feedback on the draft version I posted earlier (which also gives some ideas about what next week’s installment will cover).  Apologies in advance; if I missed anybody in the credits at the end of the article in the Seminal; please let me know and we’ll get it fixed.

And what a great chance for first-hand experience with activism on Twitter!  It’s easy, too. You can start by retweeting my request for help digging this article:

RT @jdp23 #digg it! “Lessons from Skittles for activists and poets” http://is.gd/osKD #pxfridays #p2 #rebelleft #topprog

If this looks like gibberish:

• RT means “retweet”
• @jdp23 is me on Twitter.  So “RT @jdp23” means “retweeting something Jon tweeted”
• in my original tweet, #digg is a convention to let people know they might want to digg this link
• http://is.gd/osKD is a “shortened” URL which points to the digg submission for the article
• #pxfridays #p2 #rebelleft #topprog are different hashtags for progressives on Twitter

So you’re basically saying something like

“hey progressives on Twitter, and any of my followers who are interested,  I’m passing this along from Jon.  There’s something about “Lessons from Skittles for activists and poets” he thinks is interesting.  So check it out!   And if you’re on digg , please vote for it by clicking the digg it link near the top left of the digg page.  Thanks!”

Except more tersely.  It’s amazing what you can say in 140 characters.

Next week, my brother Greg, will have a post on 30 Poets / 30 Days up on Gottabook which as you might be able to guess will help explain the “poets” in the series title.    And then on Tuesdayish I’ll have a draft of part 2 on Ask the President.  The official part 2 will be published Friday or over the weekend on The Seminal.

If that’s too much to remember, no worries — I’ll tweet about them when they’re available.

jon