A recent post about social media on Clickz by Christopher Heine resurfaced last year’s mammoth of a digital ad story where Skittles took, according to critics, a “reckless” jump into the social scene. The well-known company replaced its website with an uncensored stream of consumer posts, filling their home page with content that any rational advertiser would see as corporate suicide – and they took a lot of flack. How could they make such a careless decision – leaving their website open for public vandalism and letting social conversations reshape perceptions around their brand?

The results? Well, beyond the large amount of publicity they gained through word of mouth buzz and coverage of their social stunt, “The brand increased its presence on the social site from around 600,000 fans, pre-Twitter-experiment, to 3.5 million by 2009′s end.”

Many corporations are calculated risk averters. Standards, rules, and processes are put in place to avoid any chance of threat, error, or failure – something that is most often associated with the “unknown”.  Social media – although having been around for a few years now – has a mountain of unknowns due to the transparency that takes place between consumers and brands.  I mean, what’s riskier than putting your trust in the hands of strangers – allowing them to push out messages you have no say over?

Apprehensive to abandon their control, many brands manipulate the medium to protect themselves from potentially harmful consumer messages. As a vehicle fully driven by consumer conversation and content, this ultimately stifles the potential of social media. Ironic how the piece of social that businesses are most scared of… is the secret ingredient that makes it so powerful.

It’s brands like Skittles who have fully embraced social media for what it is that are getting the most out of what it is powered to do. I commend brands like Skittles for their bravery. They put a trust in their consumers that few other brands have the strength to do.