For Coca-Cola, it’s social media and a smile

Rather than struggling to control the conversation, the mega-brand ‘is what our fans say it is’

Bothered by your lack of control over your company’s social media presence, about what’s being said about you on all those platforms?

Take a look at Coca-Cola’s situation: With 5,000 online mentions daily, monitoring the conversations is a herculean task. Controlling them? Impossible.

The company’s head of digital communications remains surprisingly calm, however: These conversations will happen whether the company likes it or not.

“We don’t own these relationships at all,” Adam Brown conceded at the Microsoft and Ragan PR and Social Media Summit. “We don’t own what our brand means to our consumers. Our brand is what our fans say it is.”

That mindset drives the company’s social media strategy. Not only does it embrace the lack of control, but Coca-Cola has put its Facebook page and new social media campaign, Expedition 206, in the public’s hands.

“The authenticity is critical,” Brown says about Expedition 206. “We didn’t want it to feel like a highly orchestrated event … it’s a huge opportunity, but it’s certainly a risk.”