06.Nov.2009 How Coca-Cola does NOT use facebook
About a week ago an article of mine about Coca-Cola’s new Social Media Marketing Campaign was posted on the German site facebookmarketing.de. This site wrote on 21st of September that Coca-Cola was amongst the 5 most popular brands on facebook (rank 3). But considering that this company supplies 400 brands to 206 countries with 1,5 Billion servings per day, the roughly 3,7 Million fans appear as a small portion of a huge potential.
With it’s campaign “Expedition 206 – happiness goes around” Coca-Cola is joining all the other large companies trying to have a share in the social media buzz. The concept is that one team consisting of 3 “happiness ambassadors” travel the 206 countries where cola is supplied to in 365 days. I heard about it through a female friend of mine, who’s boyfriend Brendan is a member of the Team WOW! now competing against two other teams for the going on this mission. All three teams promote themselves with video clips on the Expedition website to convince the Internet user to vote for them. On 30th of October Team Sha-ba-ba-do brought up the rear with 21%, Team Wow was on second place with 37% and Team The Mix was leading the field with 42%.
But how does it work exactly?
The website depicts the teams and the videos as a decision making tool for the site visitors. After they informed themselves and chose a team they click the “Vote for this team” button and a window opens. The user is asked to choose a Social Media Application from these:
- Youtube
- Windows Live
- Orkut
It would be really interesting to know, what made the Coca-Cola marketing team choose these and not others. What criteria did they consider? In my opinion Cola aims at a global advertising impact, trying to convert customers to fans and give them the opportunity to communicate amongst each other. But does Coca-Cola look at all countries on earth? Did the marketing department realize how high the complexity of it’s target group really is?
Brendan, member of Team Wow! and currently living in China, did encounter problems vote catching. Scarcly anybody uses the Social Media Applications in Qingdao, a famous vacation spot in China. If you want to reach 206 countries (and more), you should know the applications ranking high (or number one) in users in those countries. I personnally do not believe you will start using an application just to be able to vote for a team on their website.
With more than 300 Million users facebook should and does play a key role in Coca-Cola’s Expedition 206 campaign. Besides casting a vote on the mission website you are able to do the same on facebook. Additionally are you requested to share that you voted on your FB wall or become a fan of Coca-Cola. But the campaign is far from being omnipresent on their facebook fan page. When a user is viewing the wall of the Cola-Page he is the tab for the campaign doesn’t show and if nobody would post anything on the wall about the campaign there won’t be any hint to it. A method of resolution would be repositioning the tab next to “info” or adding a note about the campaign to the profile picture.
Another point of criticism is that the campaign is lacking viral cross-linking. And some channels of the Internet are ignored. The videos of the teams aren’t shareable with social bookmarks. Only after I did search for the Expedition 206 on YouTube, I found their own channel, but except a link to their website in the information section of the channel there are no (click-able) links connecting those two web presences.
Coca-Cola Expedition 206 Channel on Youtube
Aside from these details, one point is crucial: Nobody in my proximity had ever heard about Coca-Cola’s social media campaign. And if they did, it was because my friend sent a mass mail to her friends prompt them to vote for Brandon’s Team WOW!. There is still a lot left for their marketing team to do. Especially when it comes to using all of facebook’s potential: I did not see any adverts promoting the Expedition and including it in FB applications like “LivingSocial” would be another starting point.
