Was Coke right in sharing ownership of its brand?

Coca-Cola is one of the world’s biggest and most well-recognized brands.  It makes me wonder how many billions – or perhaps even trillions – of dollars the company has spent to get there. That’s why it was particularly refreshing to read a recent story in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about the way the company reacted to the success of a Coca-Cola Facebook page that the company did not create.

The page was actually created last year by a pair of 29-year-old Coke fiends in Los Angeles. Dusty Sorg and Michael Jedrzejewski created the page for no other reason than they were passionate about the beverage.  It turned out to be a very popular page. Within a few weeks of its inception, it had hit 75,000 fans.  After the first million fans, the Facebook administrators contacted Coca-Cola to see if it wanted to take over management of the page.

Fortunately, Coke’s director of worldwide interactive marketing declined. His thinking was that if the company took the page over, it would be seen as an intrusion and it would lose some of its grass-roots appeal and credibility.

Instead, the company rolled out the red carpet for the page’s creators and invited them to headquarters for a sit-down. Ultimately, the decision was made to take a collaborative approach to managing the page between Sorg, Jedrzejewski and a small group of Coca-Cola employees. Today the site has 3,365,220 fans and is the second most popular page on Facebook page right behind Barrack Obama’s.

Coca-Cola superfans given the red carpet treatment

In today’s world, a company cannot maintain complete control over its brand no matter how hard it tries or how much money it spends. Brands are being discussed, debated and mutated all across the Internet. And, while companies can’t control their brands, there is still a lot that can be done to influence the discussion. At the end of the day, the key is to for a company to become a legitimate part of the community having the discussion. Relinquishing complete control of your brand can do wonders for your company’s image.

Some smart executives at Coca-Cola were well aware of this fact when they addressed this particular situation. This type of thinking may well help Coke become the choice of a new generation.

His view is that you cannot know enough about social media by reading about it to provide adequate counsel to a paying client – it is something you really have to experience to fully understand. I couldn’t agree with him more. There is but one way to understand social media and that is to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty.

Today most PR and  marketing agencies claim to have expertise in this arena — and many of them actually do. Fortunately, this experience is easy to verify — it’s all just a few mouse clicks away. If you are looking to hire an agency to help  you with your social media strategy, you owe it to yourself to do a little digging. Check up on the members of the team your potential agency is proposing. It doesn’t take long to figure out who is an active member of the community and who’s a poser, wannabe or tourist. If they are on Twitter, do they actually Tweet? If they have a blog, how often do they post? How’s the content? If they are on Facebook, do they have a lot of friends? When is the last time they posted something? Even if it is just pictures of their cat or a link to some funny video it shows that they understand the medium and how the community works — and that is important.

There is only one way to learn about social media

The Internet has forever changed the face of PR and marketing. Today the importance of Websites, blogs, bulletin boards (forums) and e-newsletters are well understood. However, when it comes to social media, things get a little sticky. Plenty of savvy marketers have found ways to effectively leverage virtual communities such as Second Life, Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed and Twitter for the purposes of building brands or influencing opinions. But for many, social media marketing is still confusing and its value questionable.

For me, Twitter was the most difficult to grasp. I knew several members of the media used it, as did most of the PR 2.0 thought leaders. But the first few times I visited the site, I could see very little value. All I saw were messages about what people are having for lunch, what they did at the gym or reports about their personal bathroom habits. The only conclusion I could draw from my initial experiences with it was that Twitter was absurd.

Just to be safe, I discussed my experience with several colleagues to see if they had any additional thoughts or insight. Ultimately, we concluded that twitter was something worth monitoring, but it wasn’t very valuable as a public relations tool. We were dead wrong.

A few months later I read about some of the various third-party Twitter tools designed to help users manage the flow of information and filter out the garbage. A few hours after that, once I installed a few of those tools, I fully understood the value and kicked myself for not figuring it out sooner. Today I use Twitter on behalf of clients, to promote my business, to promote my blog, to follow competitors, to keep up on trends and to monitor breaking news. I’m still not a Twitter junkie, but I now understand why some people are.

At the end of the day, the only way to truly understand a social media site is to become an ACTIVE member of the community rather than just a tourist or guest. Taking the time to truly get to know why a particular social networking community finds the site valuable is a worthwhile exercise. From a marketing standpoint, it is also absolutely necessity. The reason communities like these are so effective at influencing opinion is that people tend to trust information from people they know (even if they don’t know them in person). If you are seen as a legitimate member of the community – even if you are there openly representing a particular company – you will still be seen as trustworthy to some extent. If you are an obvious outsider there only to promote a single agenda, you will have no credibility and you are likely to be run out of town on a virtual rail (along with your client’s reputation).

Yes, it takes a lot of time and effort to establish yourself, but in the end, it is worth it.

When I interview a candidate for an entry level position, I always ask them to define PR. This question never fails to illicit an interesting response. A number of candidates – including some with college degrees in public relations – have been completely unable to provide a coherent answer.

The reason PR is difficult to describe concisely is that there are so many different types of PR. Helping clients clarify their message, writing news releases and talking to the press are the most widely understood functions of a typical PR person. However, publicists, crisis managers, political campaign strategists, lobbyists and other specialty “spin doctors” have also been counted among our ranks.

The best definition of PR that I’ve ever come across was from a PR textbook called Effective Public Relations that I still have from college. It says “Public relations is the management function that identifies, establishes and maintains mutually beneficial relationships between an organization and the various publics on whom its success or failure depends.”

While the definition would require elaboration to accurately explain someone’s specific PR job, it does provide enough meat to differentiate PR from other types of marketing. It is also broad enough to encompass the multiple facets of the industry. And it has stood the test of time. In practice, PR is an extremely different animal than it was 10 or even 5 years ago. However, its fundamental purpose remains unchanged.

To be sure, the emergence of the Internet as one of the best ways to spread information and influence opinion has turned traditional public relations on its head. It has given rise to a whole new group specialties and specialists and a new set of thought leaders including Brian Solis, Steve Rubel, Mike Manuel and Jeremy Pepper to name just a few.

The impact of the Internet has changed the whole communications landscape dramatically enough that it has lead many self-appointed new media pundits to declare that PR is dead. This couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, for those who embrace change and new challenges, there has never been a more exciting time to be in PR.

Of course, there have been some growing pains. One of the most high profile was a program that Edelman conducted for Wal-Mart. It is important to note, however, that Edelman was among the first PR agencies to pioneer Internet PR. When you are exploring uncharted territories, you have to be willing to take an arrow in the back. The reward is often worth the risk.

Today, it is hard to find a PR agency that doesn’t claim to be an expert in Internet PR, social media, blogger relations, etc. Unfortunately ours is an industry where perception often precedes reality. In truth, many practitioners are just now beginning to adapt and figure out for themselves what will and won’t work. The bad news is that when they make mistakes, it leads to harsh criticism that impacts us all. The good news is that many mistakes are totally avoidable. Most of the industry’s true thought leaders are sharing every detail of the secrets to their success. Their collective wisdom is available via a whole array of social media outlets to anyone who bothers to search for it (thanks to all of you for that by the way).

There is no question that the methods of communication, tools and techniques used to “maintain mutually beneficial relationships between an organization and the various publics on whom its success or failure depends” will continue to change rapidly. However, the fundamentals and foundation for success haven’t changed. The same principles that worked in 1950 will still be in play in 2050.

These include:

• Understanding your clients, their products and their industry
• Understanding the key audiences (a.k.a. “publics”)
• Developing clear, concise messaging geared toward those audiences
• Determining what forms of communication are most effective in reaching them
• Providing them with interesting, accurate and timely information that they will find valuable

Without these fundamentals in place, you can be successful whenever, wherever and however you choose to practice PR.