zahnster

It’s been a few days now since the relaunch of the Skittles.com website, and it’s been getting a huge amount of buzz for it’s groundbreaking use of social media in an official setting.

The only problem is, they’re doing it wrong, and they made a damn mess of it.

When I first heard the concept, I was very excited. I’m a huge fan of an openly social web, where the opinions and facts from people all over the world can help shape a brand. It’s clearly the direction the web is going, and a natural evolution from the early days of product reviews and recommendations.

As soon as I went to the site, however, I was repulsed, as it’s the laziest, most confusing implementation that I ever could have imagined. Completely different from what I was expecting, in every way.

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Technically, I am writing this post in response to the Golden Ticket competition being run by Carsonified. The theme of the competition is quite simple: create a blog post mentioning your desire to win the contest, link to it, and gather up 25 comments. The prize is a ticket to all Carsonified events in 2009 (these are the guys who run FOWD, FOWA, and such conferences), backstage passes, airline and hotel to 1 event, and an invite to a VIP speaker dinner, which is all very bad-ass.

Just recently have I come to understand the full benefit of professional networking. Although I frequently have desired to go to conferences, in actuality I have only been able to go to one – Refresh 06, and that was only because it was a local event. I nearly made it to FOWD last year, but got horribly sick the morning of and was never able to make it out.

Since then, and quite recently actually, I have started to get back into the professional networking vibe. Thanks to people like Charlie O’Donnell, who runs NextNY, I have started to see the real benefits of professional networking. Just tonight I went to a NextNY ShakeShack event, and it was a lot more productive and fun than I had imagined. I’m sitting here now with a bunch of awesome business cards, all from smart, talented people in the industry. We shot ideas, talked technical, and a grand time was had by all.

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I’m a fan of sites that are to the point. It’s one of the big things I love about the whole ‘web 2′ movement. Cut the crap, get to the good stuff.

It is knowing this that I find myself addicted to the newest in a long line of blogging sites, Tumblr. According to Tumblr, “If blogs are journals, tumblelogs are scrapbooks.”

And they really are. With preset post settings for blogs, pictures, video, quotes, links, and chat transcripts, it is the ultimate quick blogging tool, allowing for a freedom to create spontaneous, quirky posts. It’s like Twitter, or Pownce, but with a little more sustenance – and a lot less of a dependency on social interaction.

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