Coke’s ‘fans first’ approach in social communities
Really interesting. It’s impressive to see Coca-Cola stating that Coke’s homepage “isn’t just coke.com, it’s google.com” and even “hyves.nl, youtube.com, facebook.com”.
On Facebook alone, they got 95 videos, 4 600 photos (!), 90 000 comments (!!), 500 000 likes (!!!). How hard would it be to do the same thing on their own website. What energy would it consume. I have long been advocating for people to go to where people are (all the popular websites), instead of trying to attract them somewhere they don’t want to go (your own website).
But there is an interesting consequence. It looks like you can create a levy effect when you rely on other popular websites, and that people will actually use these websites to create content for you: they will put comments about your brand on facebook, pictures of your events on flickr, etc.
Once again, how hard would it be to get the same amount of content on your own webpage?
Coca-Cola is right in saying that their job is to be everywhere instead of trying to lure their fans to go to some ridiculous centralized website that will be desert as hell.
The obvious problem is that you need to be able to adapt to these various websites. You cannot communicate the same way on Flickr and on Facebook. But isn’t it better to spend your energy on this, rather than reinventing the wheel by trying to create a so-called “social network” on your own webpage?
