How Coke uses Social Media

Good interview with Carol Kruse, Vice President, Global Interactive Marketing for The Coca-Cola Co.on eMarketer. Carol goes into some detail about how Coke approaches social media and the challenges that it presents.

eMarketer: Within social media, are you dealing with issues such as how much a Facebook fan is worth and the ROI for various forms of earned media?

Carol Kruse: I think before you have ROI you have to really understand how social media is driving your business. If you’re a traditional sales funnel type of company—if you’re selling something online—you could say, “I know how many sales I got out of that social media app.” We are not a funnel company, but we still need to measure the value of what we do. I can’t measure it in actual incremental sales because I’m not selling something online. It’s much safer to say we are focusing on measuring the business value of different types of digital marketing.

In that context, we are asking whether it’s driving brand health or brand love. Is it driving purchase intent? In some cases, like search and online advertising, we have been able to measure ROI driving true incremental volumes and true increases in sales. It’s the same thing from a loyalty and CRM standpoint. We have a lot of online promotions and online loyalty programs like My Coke Rewards, and we’ve certainly measured the amount of true incremental volume those type of programs drive.

eMarketer: Are you satisfied with the type of metrics or benchmarks that are in place for online advertising?

Ms. Kruse: If you’re going to shift money from one pot to the other, you certainly want to make sure it’s going to be equally effective. Lots of companies would like to improve the ability to measure these new forms of media. I think as a company, we have gotten on board on the measurement issues very early on.

It continues to amaze me that measurement of successful social media campaigns continues to be such a hurdle for companies to overcome. SEOBook had a great post last week on this topic and Peter laid out several different ways thta you can measure a successful social media campaign. And none of them involve how many followers you have on Twitter:)