Collabo.com

Since the birth of the World Wide Web companies large and small have been playing the domain name game; trying to come up with a killer domain that appropriately reflects their brand or creatively spinning brands around available domain names, with the .com extension being the most popular. Companies would proudly display their branded domain everywhere they could: billboards, television commercials, magazine ads, business cards, pens, bumper stickers, you get the point. Recently however there has been a shift in the paradigm, many companies are turning to social media URLs as the new destination of choice for their web savvy consumer audience.

 

Twitter pages are popping up on business cards, MySpace pages are popularly marketed for musicians, and some of the top brands are promoting their Facebook fan pages over their company URLs. VitaminWater, for example, has been tagging all their ads with facebook.com/vitaminwater for a new campaign featuring NBA stars Kobe Bryant and LeBron James. We also recently reported that Volkswagen commercials containing facebook.com/vw have been airing on major television networks. Rather than trying to build detached communities within their own Web properties, companies are leveraging the power of viral marketing through social networks. If I become a fan of VitaminWater through my Facebook account, all my friends are going to get the message on their ‘news feed’ next time they log in, which gives them the opportunity to easily become a fan, without even having to navigate to the company’s fan page.

 

This trickle down effect is what companies are hoping for, the more people that become fans, the more networks of friends they are exposed to. Fan pages allow companies to send messages directly to the news feeds of users and also allow users to post comments and feedback to company fan pages. Regular interaction with consumers is a key element to any brand marketing strategy, and social media is making this easier and more accessible than possibly ever before.

 

A slightly different twist to this story is the case of Skittles. When you visit the Skittles website these days you are prompted for a date-of-birth verification. You would think with this type of authentication, popular with alcohol related websites, that Skittles now come in the fun flavors of Tequila Sunrise and Rainbow Rum; this is not the case. Skittles is actually streaming all “Skittles” related tweets directly from Twitter to their home page, without filtering the results. So if you were to tweet that “Skittles are $#&%*ing super delicious,” the uncensored text would appear on the main page of the Skittles website. While this is a ’colorful’ way to see how the world at large uses the “Skittles” brand in day-to-day conversations, some say that parent company Mars could be running with scissors.