whirledgital

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.