Business and Social Media

I work for an international company that had revenues of slightly less than €76 billion in 2009/10.  This puts it firmly in the Top 50 largest companies in the world by revenue.

In contrast, the Coca Cola Company had revenues of slightly less than €26 billion, so about one-third the size but by no means a small company.  (Bear with me, I am going somewhere sensible with this!)

Whilst there are many differences between the two companies, one that I have recently become aware of is their approach to social media.

This was prompted by a blog posting in the Harvard Business Review by Joe Tripodi, the Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing and Commercial Officer of the Coca-Cola Company.  So, quite an important guy.  You can see the blog post here: Coca-Cola Marketing Shifts from Impressions to Expressions

As you might imagine, it’s a very good piece on how marketing have had to change their game to recognise and accept that information now doesn’t just flow from the company to the consumer.  It also flows from the consumer to the company and from consumer to consumer.

The article makes for fascinating reading, including the surprise fact that the Coca Cola Facebook fanpage (25 million fans and counting) was set up by two consumers, not by Coca Cola!  The article also describes some of the lessons that Coca Cola has learned along the way.  The most interesting (to me) is this one:

The emphasis is mine.

Be a facilitator who manages communities, not a director who tries to control them. In 2009, we launched Expedition 206. Consumers voted for the three people they wanted to see travel the world as Coca-Cola Ambassadors, visiting most of the 206 countries where Coca Cola is sold and driving an online conversation about what makes people happy around the world. On every step of their 273,000 mile journey, the ambassadors blogged and created all the content. Our role was to facilitate their journey, which was no small task. We had to give up control of the content, so our ambassadors could share their own experiences. In an era of consumer expressions, seek to facilitate and participate with communities, not control them.

Compare and contrast with the Micro-Blogging Rules of my employers:

·        External communication in social media on behalf of The Company requires express written approval by the Corporate or Sector social media representative.

·        Do not link to resources which are not congruent to The Company’s Social Media Guidelines.

·        Only “retweet” when the truth is traceable.

·        Only talk about topics in which you are an expert and which are within your field of competence.

How different can you get?  We move from Coca Cola recognising that they no longer actually own the brand to the old school ‘Command and Control’ that says we’re doing this because we feel we have to but we don’t really understand why and we really don’t understand how it works.

Further evidence

The Business Unit in which I work has just launched its own Twitter feed and Facebook page.  At the time of writing, the Twitter feed has been up for 10 days.  They are following 9 people/companies, 5 of which are other internal business units, and have 22 followers, most of whom seem to be employees (including me!) and 4 of them have protected accounts so you can’t see what they tweet anyway.  There is a grand total of 13 tweets, all of which say ‘look what we can do.’

Now I understand that I’m comparing a B2C company with a B2B company and they will necessarily have a different approach, but come on guys!  If you are going to do it, at least do it right!

Now I’m no expert on Twitter but at the very minimum have some sort of coherent policy on why you want a Twitter feed, identify the companies and people you want to follow (and why) and start following them.  Start retweeting industry relevant information, reply to tweets of those you are following, put some sort of human face on what you are doing.  Ten days into the account, they should be following at least 50 people or companies and tweeting at least three times a day, only one of which should be about us.

Oh, I had forgotten those rules, hadn’t I?  How can you retweet anything if you can’t trace ‘the truth’?  What is ‘the truth’ anyway?  How can you tweet that frequently when everything has to be signed off?

Why do some companies get it so right and some get it so wrong?