Even those that make a career convincing companies to be more active in listening to the voices of their customers were shocked to see the drastic moves of candy pusher Skittles.

This morning Skittles. removed all semblance of what we have come to expect from a corporate website and taken up what might be the most voracious adoption of social media.

They have taken down their previous website and linked to an external social media website Twitter Search with a custom search of “skittles” with a little more than a small square overlay to differenciate it from the 3rd party site.

The basic concept of the search is that visitors to the skittles.com website would be able to see the conversations about skittles between users of twitter. Essentially leveraging the conversations about skittles as content for their website.

It seems as though the principle of identifying and engaging social media word of mouth is here. However the implementation is either horribly misguided or a cheap publicity stunt.

They have effectively thrown out their previous website and banked on a narrow channel.

Though they have benefited from unprecedented free coverage (at this time it is the #1 trending term), it is not a sustainable marketing strategy and not something that I think will or should for that matter be replicated.

Most people are more fascinated by the misguided and horribly irrelavant attempt at trying to create something viral rather than actively engaged.

It is great that they are leveraging the conversations already out there and I believe more businesses should do the same but every online media strategist that I have spoken to about it agrees that social media should not be the only tool used in a web presence.

This is clearly a gimmick, if you would like to see a more effective adoption we can look at Zappos or Freshbooks which use twitter in addition to solid, sustainable marketing.

Both encourage employees to be engaged and they are very active in leveraging conversations and word of mouth. Zappos in fact were probably a big influence on Skittles as they were the first to integrate the conversation feed into their web presence.

So looking through the noise and hype, what are the emerging trends to take away from this?

1. Word of mouth is louder than advertising

2. Marketing is becoming a two way conversation
3. Smart brands leverage real testimonials found through social media

Personally I am interested to see how people will react to the buzz around this. After all I have always found that Twitter Search is really the best way of driving home the reach of social media to new clients.

What do you think of the Skittles stunt? How do you think this is going to change the game looking down the road? How do you feel social media should be integrated into web presence?