A couple of days have gone by since Mars, Inc.‘s Skittles brand tossed out its website and replaced it with links to various social media properties. So frenetic was the commentary that I decided to stay out of it other than a mention on Monday’s episode of For Immediate Release. But I just can’t keep my lip buttoned any longer.

Most of the declarations that the experiment launched by Agency.com has failed are based on the flood of obscene, racist, and otherwise tasteless tweets Twittered by the adolescent set as soon as they learned that their juvenile output could be seen on the Skittles website. These messages run counter to the brand and therefore the whole exercise was just a big mistake.

MediaPost’s Jim Sterne has gone so far as to claim that Skittles has pulled the plug on the site. I’m not sure where Jim got his information, but as of 30 seconds ago, the site is still upa nd running. I suppose he could be talking about the Twitter search page no longer being the default landing page, but my understanding was that the brand intended to cycle through the various pages. The Facebook fan page was the landing page for a while yesterday. Today, it’s the Wikipedia entry.

And the Twitter search page remains linked to “Chatter” on the navigation bar, producing all the same filth it was displaying before.

In light of the awful things people are posting, why would Skittles not pull the plug on this experiment? It could be that the powers that be believe that no publicity is bad publicity—and Skittles has been getting a boatload of publicity. I even saw a tweet this morning from someone who noted that all this Skittles talk led him to buy a pack when he was seeing “Watchmen” last night. So you can argue that the publicity is actually having an impact on sales.

I take a longer view, though. There is, in general among the social media crowd, a tendency to pile on when a company tries someething risky, despite the fact that most of the same people believe that the worst risk a company can take is taking no risk at all. The attacks suffered by Dell in the first days following the launch of its blog remains a classic example, considering Direct2Dell has become a poster child for effective customer service-focused blogging.

Six weeks from now, the idiots who are inclined to put their idiocy on display by tweeting obscenities so they can see them on the Skittles site will have tired of the game or forgotten about it altogether, having moved on to some new diversion. That will leave the page with only legitimate Skittles-focused tweets.

You may wonder if there will be any legitimate Skittles-focused tweets. That’s why I ran an advanced search on Skittles from January 1 through February 15, and as I scrolled through the results, I found 18 pages of tweets—and that was before I got beyond February 14. That means there were thousands of Skittles tweets before Mars launched its new Skittles site. And I haven’t seen one that was deliberabely provocative. Here’s a sampling:

So maybe those brand people at Mars actually knew what they were doing. While not every tweet from before the launch was G-rated, the brand is clear that it won’t market to anyone under 13 (which is why you need to enter your birthdate before accessing the site), and there’s nothing among these tweets that a 13-year-old hasn’t heard before. But the fact is that there’s a lot of genuine, unprompted Skittles chatter.

There also are half a million fans on the Facebook fan page, which boasts a lot of activity.

As Todd Defren pointed out in his post, “As Social Media grows in importance ??? as a trend and as a SEO influence ??? a brand???s curators must make it their mission to HIGHLIGHT and SHARE the best examples of user-created, brand-relevant content?? and either engage or ignore the tricksters and haters.”

I completely agree. But does that mean this was the best approach for Skittles to take? I might have relegated all of these pages to a single “What People Are Saying” link on a more traditional website. MediaPost’s Sterne suggests that the brand folks didn’t pay attention to the customer. I can’t tell you whether they did or not, since I’m not privy to the internal discussions that led to this experiment. Surely one of the most important questions asked would be:

“Why do people come to the Skittles site?”

...followed by:

“What story do we want to tell to people who come to the site?”

So let’s take a stab at answering these questions:

What would bring people visit the Skittles site? While some might be looking for nutrition information or some other facts and figures (all of which is contained in the Wikipedia listing), I would guess most people go to a site like Skittles.com because somebody says, “You gotta see what’s on this site.” And that’s exactly what people were doing earlier this week when the revamped site was unveiled.

What story do we want to tell people who come to the site? I can easily imagine the branding folks sitting around a conference table saying, “The story is that Skittles is more than just a candy. It’s a community. The people who eat Skittles are cool. They mix it with vodka. They eat it and have sex. They turn their friends onto it. And they talk with each other about all these things. You want to be a part of this community. You don’t want to be left out!”

And if that was, in fact, the story they wanted to tell, I would be hard-pressed to come up with a better way to tell it.

But as I’ve noted so often in the past, the damn site has only been up for a few days. Let’s see how it moves the needle after a month or two before we start passing judgment.

Right. As if.