The Coca-Cola Company’s Groundswell Award Entry – Energizing Category

Coca-Cola Celebrates Its Fans on Facebook

History: The Coca-Cola Facebook Fan Page was created by Fans for Fans. In fact, when Fans Dusty and Michael created the Page, they broke Facebook rules by positioning themselves as brand representatives, a common problem for many social media platforms and brands. When Facebook turned to Coca-Cola about handling these renegade Fans, the situation begged an age-old question—“Who really owns the brands that have become such a big part of consumers’ lives?” When faced with similar violations of Terms and Trademark rules, other companies have shut down or taken over these communities; instead, Coca-Cola enabled and empowered the Fans by encouraging Dusty and Michael to “tell this story to the world” (please watch video to see the story: http://CokeURL.com/rkw3). Coca-Cola takes this collaborative approach with Fans very seriously, and operates the Page as an example of their “Fans First” strategy, allowing Fans to supply most of the content and discussion points on the Page. While focusing many of its efforts around the Fans, Coca-Cola also continues to innovate in order to meet the unique challenges of marketing globally and locally and offering exclusive content. The team has developed proprietary solutions and innovations such as implementing Creative Commons, creating a Brand Tab, incorporating a Feeds Tab that pulls in other Coca-Cola social media streams, and being among the first to implement the Fan Box. Coca-Cola’s “hands-off” approach combined with these innovations has allowed the Coca-Cola Fan Page to maintain its position as one of the largest Pages on Facebook - based entirely on earned media.

Community Engagement: Coca-Cola solicits content from Fans and highlights Fan favorites on the Page. Content posted by Fans simultaneously populates the Fans’ own Wall and News Feeds as well as those of friends’ (who may or may not be Coca-Cola fans), reaching far beyond the standard Fan base. The same is true whenever a Fan “likes” or comments on content posted to the Page—countless non-Fans are seeing their Friend’s interaction with Coca-Cola content. All of these activities drive more new Fans to sign up and declare their love for the Coca-Cola brand, energizing the community around this favorite product. The vast majority of this content is pure brand “love.” From time to time Fans do share their various opinions, and Coca-Cola strives to maintain its “Fans First” philosophy by not censoring or removing negative commentary about the brand. Instead, the Fans are the ones who publicly defend “their” brand on the Page. This approach ensures that the brand is listening to and learning from the community, and this engagement makes certain that the world’s most recognized brand continues to give Fans what they want.

Results: So what does all this brand “love” look like in numbers? At the time of this submission, the Coca-Cola Fan Page has 3,662,191 Fans. The amount of Fans grows every single hour, every single day. At Coca-Cola, we believe that there are several reasons why new people decide to declare their love of Coke every day, but chief amongst those is seeing how their friends are interacting with the brand. In July 2009, 62,323 new Fans joined the Coca-Cola Facebook Fan Page and over the course of the month, nearly 3% of Coca-Cola Fans interacted with the Page at some point without a single dollar being spent on media. In July alone, Coca-Cola spoke to its Fans 15 times via various formats (Status Updates, Wall Posts, Photo Posts, or Notes), and as a result of these Fan connections, the Page saw a total of 82,228 “likes” and 8,187 comments. Fans also posted (unsolicited) on the Wall 5,578 times in July. All of this Fan Page activity comes from existing Fans, but every time they interact with Coke via a “like,” comment, discussion board post, or photo/video upload, their actions are broadcast in News Feeds to their own friends and shown on their profile pages.

Conclusion: Essentially, these Fans love the Coca-Cola brand, and continue to send that message to their other friends by their actions, driving even more Fans to join. Coca-Cola’s interaction with the Fans drives more Fans to engage with Coca-Cola and show their brand “love,” creating a true momentum effect. If Coca-Cola directly solicited new Fans, the impact would not be nearly as great as the Fan growth driven by friends of Fans—friends trust products their friends like and recommend. This fact is becoming widely recognized in the era of social media, and Coca-Cola believes this is proven time and time again by the increase in new Fans that coincides directly with heavy Fan comment/posting days. Coca-Cola fans are the best promoters of the brand!