Coca-Cola is Social by Nature, Big Brands and Social Media
Time 22:14
How do big corporate brands implement social media? One answer is, they don’t, their customers do it for them. That’s one way, others include:
- Providing social tools – Facebook applications or widgets
- Cause collaboration – Supporting in dollars and actions a cause involving company and customers
- Being one of many in a non-branded social space – jumping onto Twitter as a company or a rep of a company with full weight of delivering actions on behalf of the company
- Customer collaboration – customers that support company goals work in conjunction with social network in completely transparent way to share ideas for greater good
In this podcast, Mike Donnelly, the director of worldwide interactive marketing for Coca-Cola, shares his experience with social media and one of the world’s most recognized brands.
Even though social media is new, the conversation reveals that the historic core brand personality remains as the foundation of participation in this case. Coke is a social brand, remember this early seventies commercial, at a time of domestic and world transformation, the common denominator in this ad was sharing.
The act of being social for Coke is also a one-to-one relationship, here with Mean Joe Greene and a little fan.
Fast Forward to Today
Being social in a world of immediate access to information, the ability for anyone to produce & consume multimedia, and the unbound energy of ideas means the relationship is multilateral. Your brand is company to individual, individual to company, and individual to individual, oh yeah with the rest of the world having access to just about all of it. That last part is what makes it dynamic for Coke. I mean after all, how many beverage companies would want customers spraying their product into the sky instead of drinking it. Now that’s classic, as done by Eepy Bird
Coca-cola also provides social tools to use like its Facebook application called Coke Tags. It’s an interesting use of technology that allows the interests that an individual places inside the tag to be shared with that individuals friends. So a Bluegrass Band James Reams & The Barnstormers can get some name recognition inside a Coke Tag, go figure,
What way do you think your company can be social? Call in your comments and questions to 206-600-6887 and we’ll get them on the next show.
Places I am Hanging Out
Luncheon Discussion – A Different Perspective, business fundamentals of social media, October 27 (Speaking)
Mississippi Hospital Association, November 6 (Speaking)
Society for New Communications Research Symposium November 14, Cambridge, MA (speaking)
And if you are in Minnesota online at the Social Media Club Minnesota
Tags: Coca-cola, Coke Tags, Eepy Bird, SNCR, Social Media Club
This entry was posted on Thursday, October 9th, 2008 at 11:05 am and is filed under marketing.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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October 10th, 2008 at 4:32 am
[...] Continued here: Coca-Cola is Social by Nature, Big Brands and Social Media [...]
November 9th, 2008 at 9:40 am
Hi Albert,
I just discovered your podcast and am really enjoying them! The format and content are great.
Considering my admiration, I hate to write on a slightly negative note. I’ve been reading Paul Gillin’s “Secrets of Social Media Marketing” and it is just one of probably many books that discusses Coke’s terrible reaction to the Eepy Bird guys.
“At Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta though, the mood wasn’t so exuberant. Coke lawyers fretted about liability problems from amateur chemists trying to duplicate the experiment. When the Journal called for comment, a spokeswoman said the ‘craziness with Mentos…doesn’t fit with the brand personality’ of Coke. ‘We would hope people want to drink [Diet Coke] more than try experiments with it,’ she said.”
Gillin goes on to acknowledge that Coke’s marketers did end up contacting the guys in support but it took several months!
Now, I totally understand Coke’s reticence, but to hear Mike talk as he did on your podcast struck me as, at best, insincere. It sounded as though they’d been on board from the start and really promoted it. I believe at one point he clarifies that Coke did not, in fact, compel the Eepy Bird guys to do this in the first place! That sounds like an arrogant re-writing of history to me.
I think you did a great job speaking with him and I understand if you didn’t want to get into the weeds. But I did want to leave a comment about it too. For Mike, a guy who claimed to understand social media, yet still threw in Coke’s tagline in seemingly every other sentence…something sounded off to me.
Again, that’s just my opinion; I may be wrong about the whole thing. But this comment aside, again, I am really enjoying the podcasts. Keep up the good work!
May 19th, 2011 at 5:39 am
Thanks for the good posting.
Social Media Marketing Statistic is required to maintain for the successful result because the number helps to make future plan for the smooth running of business. There will be a specific trend tracking that you will want to use when you restore your social media marketing campaign. To track the analytical data which is very important we should use Google analytics , Woopra and Omniture. These are the most successful marketing gurus. While setting your market campaign find your target, then track the hits you get through each of the possible social media sites. Blogs can be tracked, too.
May 19th, 2011 at 5:41 am
Thanks Albert.
Strategy and Brand Planning is an essential step. To raise awareness and project your brand into the market place well-conceived branding is needed. Planning includes choosing the best social media platforms to invest time in to virally accelerate participation and results.