Skittles and black hat PR

Please retweet: I had a rather loathsome thought about how to produce some black hat publicity cheaply and easily. All you need to do is set up a twitterbot to post the following message or a variant of it about once every minute:

ProductX is much nicer than skittles! We have a better website too. Please retweet what we are doing to the skittles site. www.productX.com

It will then show up all over the skittles web site front page (www.skittles.com). If it is not giving enough coverage just up the frequency and it will cover more of the page (currently once a minute will see you in the top half of the page fairly reliably); you need to keep it reasonable though as you don't want to be nasty.

After the skittles site became plastered you then "tip off" all the newspapers about what has been done to the site. Send them screenshots and so forth. There should ensue a furore where skittles get credit for leading the way with social media, product X get credit for cottoning on fast and the whole thing is seen as an amusing battle of wits. To help this along submit articles playing it that way so lazy journos can just copy them. Any good PR firm could make this work,.

If you are really lucky skittles would try some sort of law suit making for even bigger publicity.

Asking around suggested that Nestle might be the best people to sell this to as they are innovative online and sell sweets which compete directly with skittles.

Oh, by the way, the usual black hat disclaimer applies:

"Don't try this at home boys and girls"

Rufus Evison

P.S. One final question: How long before someone uses this as a place to propose marriage? I have already used it to talk to someone, so why not to propose marriage? If Skittle are not forced to kill it first it will happen...