In the great Facebook fan rush of 2009, Skittles stood out. The Wrigley brand was able to accumulate a staggering 3.6 million connections. This gave the brand an opportunity to message this audience — but not much more.
Last month, it decided to get real. Skittles kicked off “Mob the Rainbow,” a social media campaign that turns loose its virtual friends on the real world in service of fun challenges. To start, over 45,000 Skittles fans created Valentine’s Day cards for an unsuspecting traffic enforcement officer in San Francisco. Skittles filmed the encounter and posted it on Facebook, bringing the effort full circle from digital to physical back to digital. It led to another boost in Facebook fans, with nearly 500,000 added in a month.