Coca- Cola is launching new Social Media Guidelines which include how to handle situations dealing with customer satisfaction issues. In addition to guidelines, they have create two types of associates: those who will represent Coca-Cola on Social Media (spokespeople), and those who will add their eyes and ears to ensure management are aware of the sentiment surrounding the Coke Brand.
Coca-Cola has created a cadre of associates trained and certified to be Social media Spokespeople and created guidelines and a support structure for them. They are also clever enough to realize that all associates and the extended family worldwide including agencies, vendors and suppliers, may find comments both positive and negative on twitter, facebook or other social media site and may want to converse ‘about’ the company as opposed to ‘on behalf of’ the company. Aside from having guidelines for these ‘non spokespeople’ on how to behave in social media when they are talking about Coke, what is interesting is that Coke has provided them a way to get customer feedback that need company responses to management’s attention.
It will be interesting to see how this rolls out.
Andy Sernovitz interviewed Adam Brown, the Head of Social Media at Coca-Cola on these new guidelines. See the video below.
The actual Coca-Cola guidelines are available in a download document and is worth the read. It is only 3 pages long. You can see email support structure set up for both the Social Media Spokespeople and the ‘non spokes people’ in the document.
Would you agree that this is a model for other organizations to emulate?
