Novedge in the World of Social Media

On March 2nd, Skittles shook the world by changing its homepage to a big social media playground; when navigating to skittles.com you found yourself in a stream of Twitter messages with the tag #skittles. For 24 hours this was a big hit, but there was no filter, and also abusive tweets from pranksters about the company and its products turned up at the homepage of Skittles. The following day, the homepage was redirected to the fanpage of Skittles on Facebook, with almost 600,000 fans. Via the menu option 'chatter' you could still enter the Twitter stream. Today (March 4th) the homepage of Skittles is redirected to the Wikipedia page about Skittles.

Many people expressed their opinion about this campaign; some called it a genius and innovative move (although risky), others called it an utter failure, 'the worst thing to ever happen to social media branding'. But the fact is that Skittles got huge media attention during these days, everybody talks, tweets, and blogs about it (including us).

Incorporating social media in companies is a hot topic nowadays. This doesn't mean that when you'll navigate to our website next week, you'll end up at Facebook or Twitter, but it is very interesting to see all the developments in this field! How far are companies going to attract people with the use of social media channels and to have them interact with each other and the company? What is the best channel to interact with your (potential) customers? There are so many options to choose from, just think of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Friendfeed, LinkedIn, (corporate) blogs, communities. So you subscribe to (some of) these channels, and then what?

Novedge is exploring the mysterious but wonderful world of social media too by launching a big campaign.

Novedge is exploring the mysterious but wonderful world of social media too by launching a big campaign. Novedge has a page at Facebook and LinkedIn, our news source Pulse already has 141 (and counting!) followers at Twitter as @_Pulse_, and our community SpaceClaiming has 580 members. And of course, we have this blog :-). But besides that, Novedge is also starting a new community, called RhinoJungle (with its own Facebook page). This community is set up especially for the users and fans of Rhino and all Robert McNeel products. With facilitating these communities, Novedge wants to offer an extra service to our customers, to create a platform for sharing ideas, questions and 3d-work.

With this adventure Novedge aims for more direct communication, growth of members of our communities and a growth in followers on Twitter. We believe that the world of social media is boundless.

Mirjam Hart

For more information on this topic, take a look at this foldier sPression, an online collection of the Novedge social media activities.