I was committed to never using the term “social media” on my website, but I’m afraid it’s going to be unavoidable in my blog. With the prevailing marketing chatter over the last 48 hours or so about the new skittles.com , there’s really no other term to employ.

To put it in its simplest terms, Skittles has removed a traditional home page from its website; instead, you hit the Skittles Twitter home page and an overlaid nav which will take you to: the Skittles Facebook home, the Skittles YouTube brand channel, a Skittles Flickr page, and yes, information about the (limited but tasty) Skittles product line.

I saw a tweet fly by about how this was an incredibly brave move and that courageous brand managers should sit up and take note.

Well…it’s still fairly cool for a mass-market brand to be active on Twitter (that’ll last about another four days). And I am happy that the Skittles team are together enough to have their, um, social media pieces sorted.Today it would be a bit sad, ok, unheard of, to not have one’s Facebook brand page and so forth set up.

But may I ask what all of this does for Skittles?

What exactly will Skittles-centric Twittering do to increase candy awareness and consumption? Is this where the Skittles core audience is to be found? To judge from Skittles-Twitter-Homeland, all Skittles has done is bait the Twitterverse into snarky comments. That doesn’t matter, it’s still discussion- but how is this discussion going to drive sales? Maybe one or two hungry Twitterers will develop a sudden craving upon the reminder of Skittle deliciousness, but it hardly seems that Twitter should be the Skittles focus area. I applaud the willingness to have unfiltered content displayed around the brand (the Flickr page is a random search)- it’s brave and could lead to some cool usergen content – but again, exactly how does this move candy?

Facebook and YouTube make a little more sense, as engaging a community around a brand is always a good move. However, again, the aggressive social stunt has only brought activity to these pages which is negative. It would seem the campaign is not reaching Skittles fans en masse, nor engaging discovery of Skittles.

There are exactly 3 videos on the Skittles YouTube brand channel at this moment. Wouldn’t it be far more productive to pour some of this energy into having more and better brand-related content? Or, if the point is to drive more Skittle conversation, why not center it around a new development or some really cool event Skittles is supporting?

If the Twitterverse were discussing how Skittles had just planted forests in deforested areas, or built houses in disaster-struck areas, the brand conversation would be a lot more positive, and a lot more interesting. They could even be rainbow-colored forests and rainbow-colored houses – but at least they’d be on point.

I can’t wait to see what this does for Skittles in the actual marketplace. Very curious.