I love that the Skittles social media campaign that launched yesterday all but took over the entirety of Twitter for an entire day. Even more than that, I love that the Twitterverse instantly assumed that they are smarter and more astute than the minds behind the social media campaign, and that Agency.com and Skittles/Mars had no idea what they were in for.

As it turns out, Day 1 of the campaign couldn’t have picked a better social media property to feature as it’s homepage. Nobody loves to gossip and spread the wildfire word more passionately than Twitterers. There isn’t a doubt in my mind that they maximized their Day 1 exposure by featuring Twitter first, instead of Facebook or Digg or YouTube or _______.

The brilliance of the strategy starts to become a little more obvious now that the flash-in-the-pan craze so common on Twitter has faded, and Skittles.com Day 2 is featuring the less frantic Facebook page as its homepage. A little less rapid-fire, a little more dialogue (with ‘Skittles’ posting responses to comments on its own wall). They’ve used the 24-hour Twitter stampede as kindling for a fire that is now burning bigger today than it was yesterday.

This is the inverse of peeling back the layers of the onion. They’ve recognized the lifespan of buzz on various social media outlets, and are chaining properties together in the campaign to leverage one property as a build into the next.  This is a great example of leveraging the Snowball Effect of social media to make the overall impact of the campaign greater than the sum of its parts.

Twitterverse, don’t be so quick to evaluate the merits of this campaign. You are merely the first pawn to be moved in a much longer, more strategic game of chess.