Wendy Clark, SVP Integrated Marketing Communications

Earlier this week we enjoyed listening into a fascinating web chat where Wendy Clark of Coca-Cola shared some of the principles that underpin their use of social media. To save you having to trawl through the six hour transcript we have summarized it and added a Feedback point of view.

1. Be Shareworthy: provide useful, interesting, compelling stories which are worthy of being retold by fans. In a social world it’s about initial influence
2. Listen and Engage: real time listening & engagement are new skills that are now a mandate for businesses; If you ignore this you risk irrelevance with your customers; Engage in a real time dialogue
3. Think Big. Start Small. Scale Fast: The key to rapid innovation is testing, learning, failing, fixing & then scaling; This stops us scaling the wrong things
4. Social’s an amplifier, not a silver bullet: We’re believers in the power of social to make everything else we’re doing better; Disciplined to use owned, earned, shared and paid media (in that order) with Social at the Heart
5. Content is the new currency: Social network cache & success are incredibly important to both teens and young adults; Create accordingly
6. We might be shepherds, stewards and guardians of our brands but we no longer control them: Co-create & participate with your fans
7. Be Flawsome = awesome w/ your flaws: Consumers are not interested in the corporate veneer; Brands must be real, authentic, human

Other key comments:

• Studies point to social + other media = better ROI
• Core metrics are: reach / engagement / brand love / brand value which we achieve through integrated plans
• Spreading/replicating successful content doesn’t spread as effectively – originality is critical online
• “We thought we could plan real-time engagement, turns out real-time is…real-time!”
• “80% of the content & conversation online is not from us…”
• Brands and consumers participating and co-creating together can be a 1 + 1 = 3 scenario
• Use a 70/20/10 rule – 70% on what we know works now, 20% on things new to plans 10% unknowns

The way in which Coca-Cola uses social media is not confined to power brands, youth audiences or the soft drinks category. Everything Wendy was kind enough to share with us can be reapplied to just about any business, audience or category. These principles are simple but will be challenging to marketing organisations that have developed expertise around traditional marketing models. As Wendy points out though, the marketing environment has changed and with social at the center there are boundless opportunities to amplify, innovate and reinvent brands. Coca-Cola has created a culture that supports failure (so long as they learn from it) and in so doing has been one of the first in developing social media as a strategic tool that can improve ROI.

These approaches and the lessons therein are exactly how Feedback helps brands succeed through understanding the behaviours, differences and attitudes of your audiences, and helping your teams enhance engagement through strategic planning, ad testing, careful behavior monitoring and more… (And while we applaud Coke for their approach we think a dose of our human filter research would do way better than the 21% error rate of their machines.)