The Challenge Of Social Media Within A Large Organization Like Coca Cola

For the last couple of years social media has been a new and exciting discipline that for large parts has been made up as it goes along. On the fly if you will. Many companies who did embrace it did so by accident and more often than not there were slightly techie heads within or close to the organization that pushed the early adopters in to seeing value that lay within social media. Different companies and organizations are at different stages as they shift their marketing budgets to where the consumers are (Facebook for example) but what cannot be ignored is that this is now becoming a very serious part of the overall strategy for even the biggest companies in the world. More and more of our clients either have a global strategy in place that needs implementing on a local scale or want a strategy developed for the entire company. We have thankfully moved away from the days where having a Twitter account and Facebook fan page is considered a social media strategy. I found this excellent video yesterday about what Coca Cola have just agreed with their strategy…

Coca Cola Social Media Strategy

Some Areas To Consider

A company like Coca Cola who have 100,000 employees all over the world speaking many different languages and using hundreds of different social media platforms are going to have a unique challenge and as you can see from the video they have it distilled down to a 3 page document but you can be sure that a company as conscious about their brand as Coke will have taken months working on that document. No matter the size of your company there are some areas that you should look at…

Internal communication

Don’t just think of social media as a tool that can reach your customers but also something that you position  into the culture of your organization and empower employees to communicate internally with. Done correctly this will not only improve their productivity but also help to engage with your customers and create a whole new culture within your company.

Unified Message

Most companies probably think they know what they are about. You sell cars. What more is there to it than that? Well if a company like Coke who just sell cans of fizzy drinks think this stuff is so important then maybe you need to do something about it as well. Think about creating a couple of pages that you share with all your employees about your brand values and vision. Who is your customer, where do they spend their time online? How do you want to engage them etc etc.

Refining

Things change pretty quickly online. A couple of months is a long time on the world of social media. Trends come and go and you need to be nimble and adaptive and move on your feet. In the good old days marketing budgets and plans would have been made on a yearly basis but that just doesn’t cut it anymore. You need to constantly be planning, accessing the market and refining your strategy.

Summary

This post is just to get you thinking about some of the areas that you might need to start thinking about within your organization and show you that one of the biggest brand savvy companies in the world with 100,000 employees has a worldwide social media strategy in place. I just have a hunch that if this is something that Coca Cola put so much emphasis on then it might be worthwhile you getting your own full strategy in place.

Tags

• branding
• coca cola
• engaging
• marketing
• online
• planning
• plans
• Social Media
• strategy