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Coke wants to have a chat

Coke UK appears to be treading into the murky waters of social media with this website launch. They’ve called it ‘let’s talk together’ and it seems to follow in the same vein as Walmart’s Checkout blog they launched last year. I’ve been singing the praises of Walmart’s blog to clients for a while now even though it has had a mixed reaction in the blogoshere (got to stop using that word).

They’ve got a team of people who work in the company to answer some questions from Joe public on certain issues that concern Coke. Questions have been “Isn’t Coke bad for you?” to “What is the song on your ad?”

Questions do get juicier and I guess it is refreshing to see that they have realised some of their most prized communications assets are the advocates that reside within the company; their employees.

What the web enables you to do is bring these sets of passionate people together with external stakeholders creating content through the conversation that they both engage in. It creates far more genuine convos than a corporate comms suit dishing out a disingenuous PR. This also highlights how the blur between corporate reputation management and brand reputation management should no longer be silo-ed.

Internal comms teams are going to have to play an important role in communicating the company’s values too helping to find the people who buy into these values. As a consequence, the corp comms guys are going to have to loosen the shackles that they envoke on company employees because the online world blurs the divisions between work you and personal you. 

The smart companies are the ones who embrace this, communicate their values through their employees and create content pertinent to that conversation helping to amplify the intended message. Hving always been about “the real thing”, Coke seems to be now having “real” conversations; messaging that has value across the marketing mix and beyond; PR, advertising, internal comms, corporate comms and even product development.

So, to the companies that continue to ban facebook at work: You’re missing out on employing the cheapest ad agency in town: your employees. 

WOM book practises what it preaches

Over in DC, global Ogilvy PR Digital Influence gaffer John Bell, who works on the WOMMA board with Nielsen’s BzzAgent guru Dave Balter drew my attention on his blog this week when his aforementioned blog was one of the 20 odd chosen by Dave to host his new book The Word of Mouth Manual Vol II which people can download for free. Dave is publishing his book himself having been a little exasperated with his publishers previous efforts on Vol I so it will be really interesting to see how the book takes off, essentially “seeding” the book on 20 of the most influential blogs in marketing right now. I’ve got high hopes for the strategy, considering Dave is pursuing what we are increasinlgy recommending to clients ourselves- go after the influencers!

An interesting point to note on that though is a conversation I had recently about this influencer strategy with Simon Rogers over at Market Sentinel. Sometimes, the influencers are not necessarily the right people to make something go ‘viral’, or reach critical mass, because the reason why these guys and girls are indeed influential is that they are very critical when receiving messages and will often repurpose that message for their own means, so as a PR professional, your message you want to deliver, may get lost. The real people who we should be engaging if we are wanting to ampligy reach are, who Malcolm Gladwell calls in his book the Tipping Point, ‘the mavens’. These are the guys who people rely on to connect them with new information and not necessarily add an editorial opinion caveated with that info. The message is unfiltered but then I guess you have to ask, well is it as trusted? Food for thought, but looking forward to delving into Dave’s book to find out more.

Comment is free

I’ve had a change of heart and enabled comments on my blog, for a few reasons

i) I’m getting to grips a bit more with html.
ii) Tom helped me set it up
iii) I was feeling lonely talking to myself

So now I’ve enabled comments, this is really quite scary and could get even more lonely… Though I know there are a few people who read me from my ‘superb’ SEO performance… when people search for “Tim Whirledge” on google… well it’s not hard when you’ve got a surname like Whirledge is it? My main competition it seems is my uncle’s farming estate agency business, so apologies in advance if you were looking for somewhere to park your Massey Ferguson…