Skittles made a bit of a splash in the media world recently with a relaunch of their homepage that essentially created an overlay for their various web properties, starting with a Twitter page displaying all tweets mentioning the Skittles brand name.  You could also check out their Flickr photo gallery or their Facebook fan page.

Nice enough idea, but I suspect it will enjoy its five minutes of online fame before falling by the wayside.  However, imagine such an approach is used internally on the corporate Intranet.  The single great feature of the so called web 2.0 applications is that it puts you in touch with customers as never before.  The problem generally is that those customer voices are generally only heard by the web savvy people within a company.  The overwhelming consensus still seems to regard Twitter as an oddity that will have nothing of use for them.

Blammo, this would shoot that down instantly.  The modern marketing credo puts the customer at the very heart of everything the company does, it’s not just enough for marketing folks to care about the customer, it’s something that each and every employee should care about.  But unless you’re customer facing it’s often difficult to know what your customers are doing, what problems they’re having and generally how they’re finding your products.  Now that can change.

The Skittles website will probably fade into obscurity within weeks, if it hasn’t already done so, but by jove it doesn’t half offer up a great opportunity for how to put social media into the faces of each and every person in your company.