Social Machinery

Coca Cola is focusing most of its social media marketing efforts on mainstream social networking sites like Youtube, Twitter and Facebook, moving away from building their own communities. According to the brand, they will continue to create campaign sites on existing community sites instead of building their own.

“In some cases some of our campaigns won’t need a coke.com-hosted site,” claimed Prinz Pinakatt, Coca-Cola’s interactive marketing manager. According to him, Coca Cola would like to place out activities and brand where people are instead of dragging them to Coca Cola’s destination sites.

I think is a fundamental change in social media marketing strategy; Destination sites are becoming less relevant for brands as they need to move their activities where their customers are. Building communities from the scratch doesn’t make much sense when someone already managed to bring millions of people together. Start your own community is an expensive and risky marketing activity.

Pepsi vs. Coca Cola: A new digital battlefield 

Is interesting to see how Coca Cola and Pepsi are doing in the social media space. If we compared them on Twitter and Yotube, Pepsi exceeds Coca cola by far. Pepsi Twitter  account has more than 15.500 followers and 16.800 people following it, while Coca Cola counts 10.503 fans and follows 6.758 profiles. When it comes to Youtube, Pepsi got more than 420.000 views and 5.800 subscribers, while Coca Cola accounts just for 12.000 views and 250 subscribers.

Nevertheless, when it comes to Facebook, is a totally different story. Pepsi has roughly 256.000 fans on their page, meanwhile Coca Cola has reached more than 3.756.000 fans, a huge difference. Actually Coca Cola is the Second Facebook page with more fans just below Obama’s Facebook page.

Clearly, both companies have taken different approach. In Coca Cola’s case they are betting more on Facebook as this site gather a bigger target audience and bring more tools to establish a two-ways Multimedia communication channel. Actually Coca Cola’s Facebook page story is already strange. The page wasn’t created by the company, but two fans. As soon as the company realized about this page, instead of forcing Dusty & Michael J. to give it back to them, they encourage and help them to keep it alive. In fact, Coca Cola asked the two fans to record a video to tell this incredible story. The video became a viral phenomenon with people from all over the world supporting this activity.

And if you don’t believe Coca Cola’s digital strategy importance, just check these numbers given by the company: 

• 1.2 Million people search daily information related to Coca Cola on Google
• Everyday more than 1.000 post on blogs mentions Coca Cola
• 500 Tweets everyday mentions Cola Cola
• Youtube users upload in average 15 videos everyday about the brand. There are more than 100.000 videos already on Youtube.
• More than 60.000 pictures can be found on Flirck including their brand’s tag.