Coca-Cola on Facebook

Dhanush, Quinn, Amber, Priana

● Invented by an Atlanta, Georgia pharmacist in
1886.
● Odwalla, Minute Maid, and Dasani.
● Manufactures more than 3,000 products
● In 2008, professional actor, Dusty Sorg and entertainment industry
writer, Michael Jedrzejewski created a Coca-Cola brand page on
Facebook.
● Coke was chosen randomly only because they had coke on hand.
● The idea behind the fan brand page was “simply to express their
genuine enthusiasm as fans of the brand”
● This wasn’t the first fan brand page made for Coke, but it was the
most successful one.
● In three months, they had 1.2 million followers
 Coke and mentos
- Stephen voltz and fritz experimented with
Coke and Mentos and posted a video on their
website.
- It consisted of an experiment where they put
coke and mentos together.
- This video went viral online.
- Invited by The Late show with David Letterman
And The Conan O’brien show.
- “We would hope people want to drink(diet coke) more than try
experiment.”
- Coke launched a new website inviting users to post such videos.
- This boosted the sale of coke 2 liter bottles and Mentos by 5-10% and
15%.
- 27% increase in traffic to Coke.com.
Starbucks
● March 2008: Starbucks experiences a decline in
revenue and stock market vauluation
○ MyStarbucksIdea.com was a social media website
created by Starbucks where customers could contribute
ideas by posting to a discussion board. Other customers
could then debate, suggest improvements to the ideas
and up or down vote the ideas of others.
○ Out of 75,000 ideas contributed, the company chose to
implement 100 of those ideas including complimentary
WiFi, the ability to buy a friend and beverage remotely
○ and splash sticks to block the hole in coffee cup lids.
● January 2009: Starbucks launches pages on
Facebook,Twitter,Flickr and YouTube.
● June 2009: the Starbucks Facebook page reached 3 million likes and the company began
to desire to become Facebook’s largest branding site.
○ They used coupons, discounts and special offers that were promoted in-store to
encourage more likes on Facebook.
○ “This was not built as a marketing channel, but as a consumer relationship-building
environment.” - Chris Bruzzo, Starbucks’ VP of brand content on the company’s
social media success.
○ Facebook content ranged from webisodes that introduced Via (Starbuck’s instant
coffee) to photos of and by Starbucks customers at their favorite locations.
● March 2010: Starbucks runs promotion to introduce their new line of healthier pastries
called Free Pastry Day in which customers would get a free pastry with a handcrafted
coffee drink.
○ Starbucks went from being #4 to #2 on the trending topic list on Twitter.
○ By the end of that week, Starbucks added 200,000 more fans to the Facebook.
● Summer 2010: Starbucks replaced Coke as the top brand on Facebook for four months
until Coke ended up back on top. For the rest of 2010, the two brands would be neck-
and-neck for the largest number of Facebook fans.
Coke’s Brand Page
Michael Donnelly brought in Sorg and Jedrzejewski to discussion on how TCCC
could collaborate on the brand’s Facebook page

Donnelly’s team had many questions to ask

“ What could TCCC bring to the proposition that would be viewed as positive and
valuable by the community?”

“What would it mean for TCCC to co-administer the page in conjunction with Sorg
and Jedrzejewski?”

“How could both Sorg and Jedrzejewski and TCCC stay true to their aims?”
Coke’s “Fans First” Strategy

“We will be everywhere our consumers are in an authentic ‘

member of the community non-big-brand’ way”

“ Less about us, more about them”

Staying True to the Community
● “We want to talk with people, not at them as most
traditional advertising does.” - Michael Donnelly,
Worldwide Interactive Marketing, when asked how
he planned to scale Coke’s Facebook platform.
● By 2011, Starbucks and Coke had two of the
biggest brand presences on Facebook.
● A 2009 study by the digital agency Razorfish
found that:
○ 44% of those who followed a brand on
Twitter did so because they wanted access
to deals.
○ 37% of people “friended” a page on
Facebook and Myspace strictly for deals.
Reference
Coca-cola image: https://us.coca-cola.com/

Facebook logo: https://www.nl-ix.net/news/facebook/

Starbucks logo: https://twitter.com/starbucks

Dasani picture: http://www.dasani.com/water

Odwalla picture: http://www.odwalla.com/products/

Minute Maid: http://www.minutemaid.com/products/

Fans first:
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