Adam leads digital communications for The Coca-Cola Company. There are two streams of digital communications - marketing and corporate communications.
In marketing they asked thousands of Second Life citizens to help design a new vending machines that would then be placed all around Second Life locations.
Berman at MySpace.com already spoke about the promotion for Cherry Coke on MySpace.com.
“On the communications side we haven’t done as much,” said Brown. He joined on eyear ago and is starting the process.
Our brands and our company are mentioned every day 3,000 times - the majority are casual references (on MySpace saying, “I’m drinking a Diet Coke). Others are focused on issues like India, environment, corporate social responsibility.
For corporate communication sin social networking there are three steps:
- Established great monitoring tools - what’s being said but more important who is listening. Who is at the top of the pyramid and which speakers are the most relevant?
- Launching their own blogs and communities to have open and transparent communications.
- Entering discussions at other blogs and MySpace pages and entering the discussion - while being very transparent that they’re with Coke. We will respond with comments when we find credible blogs. Show that the company is listening and responding.
Getting out of “the monologue of dialogue” and veer away from one-way communications, but instead get into discussion.
We want to know who is influential so should we have issues or a crisis we have a relationship and we can return to them and have a meaningful dialogue.
This is so fast moving that if you created a college curicullum in January it would be out of date by March - Twitter just started a few months back. The head of communications at MySpace is 26 years old. You need a digital native on your team.
Traditional communications was used to dealing with 10 to 15 journalists in a week. Now how do they handle 50 to 60 citizen journalists in a week. The people who speak to citizen journalists need to be the same communications professionals who speak with traditional media. The explosion of growth is a challenge.
Here’s a good article in “The Wall Street Journal” featuring Adam Brown.
