Four Social Case Studies from Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola’s success in social media isn’t a secret. The company was recently named by Slate’s The Big Money as the brand “making the best use of Facebook,” and their well-publicized Expedition 206 campaign is billed as the company’s largest social media project ever. We’ve conducted several interviews in the past few months with key team members of Coca-Cola about the company’s efforts in community building and social media. Here’s a rundown:

Michael Donnelly, Coca-Cola’s Group Director of Worldwide Interactive Marketing spoke to us about the Expedition 206 project’s search for happiness, how Coke’s marketers have established best practices for social media marketing, and the challenge of ROI. Says Donnelly, in this excerpt published in our Daily Newsletter:

In general, we are very supportive of buying media within those realms. It’s like fishing where the fish are. Social media is where our consumers are at the moment. There’s no better way to amplify your message. If you’re building a major campaign and putting a lot of time and energy into enabling social and interactive aspects, you have to make sure people know about it.

Our strategy is to be everywhere our consumers are, but as a member of the community. That’s not to say that we think there’s anything wrong with big billboards in Times Square or Super Bowl commercials. There’s a time and a place for that. Within the social media marketing realm, our approach is to be a strong member of the community that’s enabling consumers to celebrate manifestations of the brand.

Michael La Kier chatted about how the company ties social media into its My Coke Rewards program and its drive to create emotional loyalty. Here’s a snippet of what he had to say about social media and mobile:

We offered mobile from day one—it is a big component of My Coke Rewards. People drink our brands on the go and don’t want to carry a bottle cap all day long. They can enter a code via mobile phone and SMS texting. Mobile has always been a pretty big part of our program from a participation standpoint and from a mobile messaging and marketing perspective. We also have a desktop widget so people can enter codes directly from their desktop computer.

We have a variety of ways for people to participate in the program—via SMS, the site and the widget. When they become members, we can look at what brands they’re drinking, which packs they’re buying, promotions they’ve participated in and rewards they’ve redeemed. We look at how people want to interact with us, what information do we want to know, how do we provide value and get value. We invite them to take surveys. We have a lot of information about what consumers are doing and their passions so that we can serve up rewards, offers and sweepstakes based on that information.

Carol Kruse, Coke’s Vice President of Global Interactive Marketing, also weighed in about earned media ROI and the evolution of social:

I think before you have ROI you have to really understand how social media is driving your business. If you’re a traditional sales funnel type of company—if you’re selling something online—you could say, “I know how many sales I got out of that social media app.” We are not a funnel company, but we still need to measure the value of what we do. I can’t measure it in actual incremental sales because I’m not selling something online. It’s much safer to say we are focusing on measuring the business value of different types of digital marketing.

In that context, we are asking whether it’s driving brand health or brand love. Is it driving purchase intent? In some cases, like search and online advertising, we have been able to measure ROI driving true incremental volumes and true increases in sales. It’s the same thing from a loyalty and CRM standpoint. We have a lot of online promotions and online loyalty programs like My Coke Rewards, and we’ve certainly measured the amount of true incremental volume those type of programs drive.

Adam Brown, Director, Office of Digital Communications & Social Media at Coke, spoke about the company’s Expedition 206 campaign:

We wanted to bring the idea of happiness to life and have as many people participate as possible. We haven’t done anything like this before, so it’s a new social media experiment. The three people chosen will blog, share photos, videos, interviews, tweets (@x206) and ideas about what makes people happy around the world. They’ll share their experiences. It’s the latest expression of the “Open Happiness” campaign brought to life through the power of social media.

We will be looking at what earned media provides from a ROI standpoint. We want to know what’s working and creating buzz and what’s not. We are using a cloud-based philosophy and we want to leverage all the new communications platforms as they come online. We can really adapt and empower our fans to create compelling content where they see fit.

Each of these interviews is available in their full form to eMarketer Total Access subscribers. Every day they have access to new interviews with digital marketing leaders and trendsetting entrepreneurs. Those full-version interviews are available (to subscribers) here:

• Carol Kruse: Coke Weighs Value of Social Media
• Michael Donnelly: Coke Crafts Social Media Marketing Blueprint
• Michael La Kier: Coke Seeks Brand Love via Online Loyalty
• Adam Brown: Coke Goes on a Happiness Mission