Coca-Cola: "Sharing What Matters" — Live from BlogWell

4:30 – Andy introduces Coca-Cola’s Adam Brown, Director of Digital Communications.

4:30 – Adam: Three years ago, I would have given a presentation on how our homepage isn’t Coke.com, it’s Google. While that’s still very much true, I would change the quote to say it’s now also Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and MySpace.

4:31 – Coke currently has 3.4 million fans on Facebook.

4:33 – Coke’s Facebook page was created by a couple of fans. When Facebook approached Coke to hand control of the group to the company, Coke decided to officially take the group, but to hand control back to the original creators.

4:34 – Adam: [Social media] is a huge opportunity, but also huge challenge. How do we wrangle this?

4:36 – Coke uses colleagues around the world to monitor what’s being said in various languages and cultures, but is still looking to improve in this area.

4:38 – Coke has recently created a social media certification program. Anyone who participates on behalf of the company takes this course that stresses disclosure and the nature of the evergreen web.

4:39 – Coke is seeing a lot of activity in video. Adam sees a lot of opportunities here not only for Coke, but also for other organizations.

4:40 – Coke created a special video for Facebook fans of Fanta to introduce their new product.

4:45 – What’s next for Coke: New corporate site; new blog initiatives; more music outreach; more conversations; more “purposeful entertainment.”

4:45 – Adam: This is new for a lot of us. I think we’re all learning a lot, and learning a lot from each other.

4:45 – Q&A

Q: How much do you monitor the conversations about Pepsi and other competitors?

A: I think the cola wars are back, and I love it. I think our formidable competitors are doing some great things, and we have to watch them. The consumer industry is really ripe here because you touch so many people, so many times per day.

Q: How do you demonstrate ROI on what you’re doing?

A: It depends on the tool. Facebook is nuts, we’re adding 25,000 people a day. Right now, there’s no way to quantify that. With that is a huge opportunity, but also a huge risk. If we spam them, or do something inappropriate… and certainly, we hear that “Oh my gosh, we have 3.5 million people we can send this to” a lot. We have to resist the temptation.

***UPDATE: Apologies, but battery issues prevented posting much of the great content from this presentation (incluidng several fantastic questions). But no worries, we’ll post the full videos and slides of all of these presentations soon.