More interestingly, the guys that set up the page before Coca Cola got involved are still running it, with permission and support from the company. Besides Facebook, they are also actively engaging with their fans on Twitter, MySpace, Youtube and Bebo.

As someone who has been stating the importance of social media for the last few years it is terrific to see a company with the size and relevance of Coca Cola not only noticing its impact on business, but also actively getting involved within the space.

So when the brand that, through their communications strategy, is tied to Christmas almost as much as Santa Claus himself, marketers simply have to sit up and take notice. Which is why I have been reading their recently publically published social media policy with much interest.

Have fun, but be smart

The document is made up of three separate sections:

- How the company’s core values apply to the social media space

- The company expects their associates and employees to act in this space

- Expectations for official company spokespeople within the space

You can find the complete document here.

The basic notion is that it is OK to act in this space, and even on behalf of the brand, but be sensible about your actions.

It Impacts Everyone

In a short interview with Andy Sernovitz, Adam Brown (Director of Digital Communications) explains that this document is the culmination of months of hard work between the Legal, Ehtics & Compliance, Marketing and PR departments.

This  is key. In my experience many social media campaigns fail, never get of the ground or even result in an online backlash because the internal processes are simply not designed to deal with the nature of social media. It is expected that 2010 will be the year where many companies will move from tactical activty within social media to a more strategic approach.

A social media policy is a great starting point for this strategic approach, particularly when all internal departments have been involved in its creation. This document does not have to be created from the ground up, most companies will already have internal company guidelines, they simply need to be updated.

Why Is a Social Media Policy Important

Consistency – The perception people have of a brand is made up of all thecombined  experiences and interactions a person has had with that brand. It’s not just about what your ad says, but also how your front line staff interact with customers, what someone’s colleague has said about that brand and, increasingly, what people say about that brand online. The social media policity can help ensure that all online interactions from employees provide a consistent message about the brand.

Responsibility – This also means that the way your employees behave online can and will reflect on your brand, both positively and negatively. A social media policy will make all your employees aware of the impact their behaviour can have on the brand and ensure they act within set guidelines. This is not just about making people responsible for their actions, but also to empower them. Empowered employees are happier in their job and more likely to speak positively about their employer.

Education – It informs employees of both the benefits and pitfalls of interacting online. If you expect people to behave in a certain way it is important to let them know what that is important and how it benefits them and the company. This can prevent a PR nightmare and even result in positive brand engagements, the building of relationships and loyalty as well as positive publicity.

Room For Improvement

Whilst the Coca Cola social media policy provides an interesting point of reference, I do have a ideas as to how the document could be improved on further.

Firstly, it reads a bit too much like a legal document. I understand Coca Cola has a huge responsibility to all their stakeholdersn and has to cover all bases, it reads too much like a “we are covering our asses document” instead of a “go out and have fun, but be careful document”. In my opinion the document does little to inspire people to go out there and join the online conversation.

Also, it does little to explain how social media effects Coca Cola as a whole and how employees could benefit from getting involved either on a personal level, or as a company employee.

The lack of examples and legal nature of its contents makes some of the statement ambiguous and are left open to interpretation. It helps create consistency and ensures people are awares of their responsibilites, but it does little to educate people.

Breaking Down The Silos

Having said that, it is great to see Coca Cola has broken through the silos and has managed to get all departments to work on this together. After all, social media has the potential to impact companies on so many levels that it should not be the sole responsibility of one department.

And would like to thank Coca Cola to make this document publically available. This space is still very much in its infancy and whilst some companies understand it better than others, everyone is still learning and trying to understand the full implications on business. Sharing documents like these does not just help other companies get started, but it helps the whole industry move forward in the exploration of social media.

The Importance Of A Social Media Policy

You may have noticed that almost everone in that picture wears the same orange hat. Orange is obviously Holland’s national colour, but it is also the colour of the main sponsor of this event – Unox.

Steeped in Tradition

Unox has been around since 1937 in Holland and is widely associated with the winter period. Most traditionally produced Dutch dishes, such as ‘erwtensoep‘ and ‘boerenkool met worst‘ are almost always prepared with Unox products. In the Netherlands Unox is to winter  what Google is to search.

The funny thing is that Unox is now so intrinsically linked with this event people even bring their own Unox hats just to make sure they feel they are part of the event. Unox is not just a brand, it’s part of our cultural heritage.

Marriage Made in Heaven

So the sponsorship of The New Year’s Dip by Unox makes perfect sense.

From a branding point of view the benefits are obvious: it’s a tie in with a hugely popular tradition and it provides Unox with an inobtrusive way connect people and their brand and products. Everyone coming back out of the water is greeted by a nice and warm cup of green, guey Unox soup (trust me, Dutchies love it!). And the event is widely reported, including on national news shows.

Furthermore, it’s a memorable experience for thousands of people each year. As a brand it is becoming harder and harder to set yourself apart, which is why we believe that creating a genuine brand experience is hugely important to earn the attention. With this event Unox has found a way that they not only earn attention, but they have strengthened their  link with the cold, dark months of the year and found a way into people’s hearts….and stomaches!

Dipping Toes Into Digital

It is pretty obvious I am a big fan of Unox as a brand, but also as a sponsor of this event. What I like even more is that they have taken this event from the beaches of Scheveningen to the megabytes of the internet. There is a campaign website where you can read more about the event, find event related content and images of everyone that had their picture taken on location. There is also a fan page on Dutch social networking site Hyves and the ability to pimp your own profile.

Soup It Up

However, there are a few points of improvement – whilst they have got the offline event down to a tee, there are ways in which the digital experience can be improved even further. Currently the website lacks interactivity, it provides content and information, but no way for people to provide feedback, add their own content and share their stories.

Adding social elements could help people connect with each other after, or even at the event. And there must be a huge amount of content, such as images, videos and blog posts that are produced related to this event which are currently hidden away on personal profiles and in e-mails. This could be a great way for the brand to connect with the participans on an even deeper level.

All in all this is a great event and recurring campaign and any brand that makes dark, cold winter nights like this one just that little bit more bareable gets a big two thumbs up from me!

Unox – Souping Up New Year’s Day

With this key insight in mind they looked for ways to make their brand relevant again. And so ISpyLevi’s was born.

Location Based Game

The concept is brilliant in its simplicity – they merged off- and online together in a ‘catch me if you can’ game where Twitter and mobile were used to transmit clues about the target’s location. Once the target had been identified, the utterance of the magic words “are those Levi’s?” resulted in the jeans being dropped to the floor and handed over to the pursuitor. To much hilarity of any bystanders who had no idea of what was going on!

Hundreds of pairs of Levi’s were sent out to the street and handed over to followers of the campaign’s Twitter account. The Twitter account has over 2,000 followers and the campaign is estimated to have reached over 300,000 people.

Engaging and Talkworthy

This is a great example of how social media and a real life experience can be merged into one successful campaign. The campaign is memorable, engaging and most importantly, it will get people talking about the brand. The video below gives some more details about the campaign.

So it’s all good?

Whilst I believe this has been a great campaign, there are certain elements which could have been improved upon.

The campaign has attracted a lot of attention and managed to amass over 2,000 followers on Twitter. Considering the fact the game was played based around a given location that’s a pretty good number. However, the account has not been updated for over 6 weeks now. That’s 2,000+ potential brand ambasadors that are being ignored. That’s 2,000 people who have opted in to hear from your brand.

After having connected with these people for months all of a sudden Levi’s is giving them the silent treatment. It’s like breaking up with your girlfriend, without actually telling her!This shows the problem with the lack of a social media strategy and campaign based thinking. The campaign has been a success, but with an appropriate strategy in place Levi’s could have build on this campaign.

A central spot for all social activity, such as a Facebook Fanpage or brand hub, could have provided Levi’s with the platform to draw these people in further and move them from being brand enthousiasts to brand ambassadors. They could have asked their fans to follow the main Levi’s Twitter account to stay in the loop for example – oh, what’s that? Right, no Levi’s Twitter account.

By creating a platform for long term engagement it becomes a lot easier to launch a successful campaign. Instead of having to start from scratch each time, you will have a database of brand ambassadors and people you know who are brand fans who can help you improve the campaign, as well as spread the word.

Campaign based activity in social media is fine, but without the solid foundation of a strategy many opportunities are lost to connect with people over a longer period of time.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on this campaign!

Levi’s Drops Pants To Connect With Aussie Youth Market

I remember many a time when my dad thought all his DIY wisdom put him in a better position than to carefully follow the provided instructions. His resulting tirades are responsible for half of my active vocabulary.

It turns out the DIY approach can also be applied to social media. Instead of building an expensive platform or create their own iPhone app IKEA decided to tap into a very simple tool on Facebook – the ability to tag people. Tagging is an important part of the Facebook community – it helps with the sharing and dissemination  of information, in particular photo’s and video’s.

With the opening of the new Malmo store IKEA’s agency Forsmand & Bodenfors manage to tap into this simple system. They set up a Facebook Profile for the local store manager, Gordon Gustavsson, and uploaded various pictures of the showrooms in the new store. The first person to tag an item in that store room with their name would win it as a prize. The IKEA fans website gives you a great impression of how this message started to spread among the Facebook community.

The video explaning the campaign so far has generated over 115,000 views, which is even more free publicity on top of the viral spread of the campaign on Facebook.

I believe this is an absolutely awesome campaign for various reasons. The most obvious reason would be the ROI this campaign must have generated.

Setting up a Facebook profile: free

Using the Facebook tagging feature for viral spread: free

Picking up a huge amount of free publicity and Facebook fans: priceless

Whilst that is a slightly simplistic view, obviously a good campaign would include active engagement from the brand and the prizes would have cost money as well, in the grand scheme of things these costs would have been negligable.

Secondly, it’s a recipe easily copied in other markets. No, they will not get this type of press each time they launch this campaign in another country, or even city – however, stepping outside the bubble for a second, this will be new to most people in other markets and could therefor be just as effective in creating interest and engagement with the local community.

But more importantly it shows you one of the most important things about social media – it is not about the tools, it is about the behaviour. Twitter and Facebook are smoking hot right now, but so was MySpace last year. Or Friendster before that. Sites and tools come and go, but the way they change behaviour and the way people communicate is here to stay.

So don’t get stuck in focusing on tools and sites, don’t think in Twitter, Facebook, etc, but look at how these tools change the way people communicate. This is what IKEA did and they are now, rightfully so, reaping the rewards.

Btw, does this seem like another case of a brand that got stung turning into the golden boy? Would love to hear your thoughts as always!

DIY With IKEA – Tag A Prize

The panelist included Jennifer Cisney, Chief Blogger and Social Media Manager at Kodak and Rachel Fellows, Head of Corporate Communications at Kellogg’s. One of Rachel’s comments really struck a chord and was in line with something I have been thinking about recently – it is a lot easier to get buy in from higher up when you show them some of the negative stuff our there, rather than focus on the positives.

The below video is a registration of the above mentioned panel (with thanks to DElyMyth) – the video starts at Rachel’s comment about negative comments in social media being a more persuasive tool to achieve senior level compliance.

It seems that the brands that have been stung the worst also learn the quickest. In a way this make sense, they simply have to – it’s a sink or swim scenario. One of the most used social media case studies is Dell and their Ideastorm platform. But would this platform have existed today if it wasn’t for Jeff Jarvis and the whole Dell Hell situation? Probably not.

Habitat is another brand that has had to grow up fast in social media. After the alleged intern decided to spam the Iran Election hashtag they were one of the most vilified brands in the social media community. Now they have a full social media strategy and are actively engaging with their community on Twitter and Facebook. And they are going about it the right way this time, by starting with listening:

“When we got back on Twitter, one of the first things we did was to ask our followers what kind of updates they wanted to see and they were very forthcoming in responding”, said Denise Fender, head of eCommerce at Habitat.

Traditional thinking has always been that negative news spread much faster and far wider than positive news – it seems this school of thought is still pervasive and is what drives innovation in social media. The focus seems to be on damage control, rather than harnessing the brand’s fans.

So what do you think? Does a brand need to get stung to really wake up to the potential and importance of social media? Did your brand get burnt in social media? Or do you have any more examples, please share them with us in the comments!

Do Brands Need To Be Burned To Shine?

Hi Richard, could you start by telling us a bit more about who you are and what you do?

I am part of the senior leadership team at Virgin Trains. Over the last ten years I have had a variety of roles in the business including people management, catering logistics, service development and helping shape change in Organisational Development. I am currently the General Manager for the Liverpool and North Wales. The role is varied and involved the leadership of a large team (over 160 people) delivering service on board our trains as well as working with businesses and stakeholders around the region to support commercial growth.

We know you and a few of your colleagues are very active on Twitter, can you tell us how you got involved with Twitter and why it is important to be on Twitter for Virgin Trains?

I began my current role in a region I was not at all familiar with. I wanted a way to accelerate the building of relationships and to understand what my customers value about what we did. After some thought I decided social media might be a good way to do that, and then started on Twitter.

I think it is important for us to be wherever our customers are, and a great deal of our customers use social media. This has been helped by the introduction of WiFi on board all our trains and in our First Class lounges. Despite my relatively senior position in the company, I can talk to commuters, MP’s, holiday-makers and consumers on a daily basis. It’s great to be able to connect with them even when they are flying across the country on a Virgin Train!

Does Virgin Trains have an overall social media policy or strategy and how does Twitter fit into this? And how much guidance and/or governance is there from the main Virgin brand?

Like many other UK companies we are new to social media, Twitter in particular. You could say our strategy is emergent; we are feeling our way, listening to our customers and developing our online presence. Virgin Group are of course very supportive of the work we are doing and we share ideas often, online and offline.

You are well known for moving Virgin Trains onto Twitter, but we’d love to know what else you guys are currently doing in social media. Are you active anywhere else? And is all your social media activity integrated or operated on a standalone basis?

We did something interesting a few years ago called ‘Be Inspired by Time’ which was a precursor to all the activity around social media and involvement. We have recently been having some fun with YouTube promoting our Chester service. The Marketing team have spent a great deal of time working on an advertising campaign and a brand new website that is now live. They and I now have a little space to share ideas and hopefully come up with something exciting for both our internal teams and external customers.

You have a very strong personal brand on Twitter, which is great – but also presents a challenge. What happens when you leave Virgin, who has ownership of the account?

I began using Twitter to build relationships with our customers and stakeholders. At the time, there were very few people doing what I did so I just did what felt natural to me and went on instinct. That’s why I created @Richard_Baker. I have since created @VirginTrains working with our brilliant Communications Team that I am very involved with. I am encouraging my customers to follow that but what I have found is people tell me they don’t just follow me for information about trains! We talk about our lives too. They are real relationships just in a different space.

This week I took the step to effectively ‘retire’ my personal brand association with Virgin. I have put a great deal of personal time and energy championing the socmed cause and am pleased that it has paid off.

The main focus of your work on Twitter seems to revolve around customer service – can you see Virgin Trains using Twitter and social media for other business purposes as well?

Absolutely. I am very keen for us to do more. We have some exciting stuff in the pipeline…

Do tell!

Okay! Well, I would like our Twitter to be much more inclusive, and use other channels to include user generated content. I am saying no more!

Having mentioned customer service and ownership in previous questions – where does social media actually fit into your business?

At the moment I am working closely with our Communications Team. However, I see a time when it becomes a central part of Customer Service, Marketing, Operations, Communications and Human Resources. In my opinion, we have only just scratched the surface.

How is the success of your team’s work on Twitter and in social media judged? Are there metrics that help you determine your success?

I measure our success by the strengths of the relationships we have created and the feedback we get. After all, isn’t good business all about relationships?

Amen to that Richard, and thank you so much for your time!

Interview With Richard Baker @ Virgin Trains

The phone has direct integration with social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace and comes in bright yellow, orange and pink. So what better way to show this USP by finding a group of influencers, or social butterflies as Samsung calls them, and let them build an army for a massive paint ball fight exclusively by using this new mobile device. And that’s what Samsung did with the launch in Brazil.

They found four people with over 6,000 online ‘friends’ between them, gave them a phone and 24 hours to create a group of people to lead onto the paint filled battle field.

Eventually this lead to over 200 people participating,chucking 2,000 litres worth of paint at each other in a 40 minute long colour explosion. Currently the video has over 250,000 views and the behind-the-scenes video has over 80,000 views. Whilst these numbers are impressive, the videos haven’t quite gone viral.

However, this campaign does highlight two keys issues for me. First of all it shows how quickly you can mobilise a group of people through online social networks. Within 24 hours 4 people amassed a crowd of over 200 people – and that was just for a bit of fun. Obama has already demonstrated the immense power this brings when it comes to bringing actual change to the world with his 2008 Election campaign.

And secondly, we believe brands need to create experiences  – whether that is online or offline – to be memorable and relevant. Samsung essentially used their new product as the facilitator to bring a group of people together to have some fun and create a positive experience. In essence the phone became a form of product placement in its own campaing. Not only will this make them stand out with these people, but they are also more likely to talk about the brand in a positive light because of this experience.

However, I do feel they could have done a better job with the landing page of the campaign. Instead of building on the story line and creating an even more emersive experience, they turned the page into a more traditional marketing ploy. Why not give more background on the people involved, how they went about getting their friends involved and what the chatter was instead of just having some fancy visuals and product specifications.

All in all this is a step in the right direction and its great to see such a large company as Samsung really get down and dirty (literally!) by integrating social media into their marketing campaigns.

Samsung And Their Social Butterflies

On the night three speakers presented the key findings they had found after diving into the data. First up was Tom Smith, who previously had been heavily involved with the excellent Universal McCann Wave reports. Tom outlined the reasoning behind the research and presented the most important findings. Particularly interesting were the usage stats of various online tools and the granular data on country level. For example, nearly 60% of the respondents had visited a forum in the last month yet less than 10% had been on Twitter.

The research indicated that adoption was driven by three key factors: Culture, Generation and Gender. Some other intriguing stats showed us that people would consider phoning up 9% of their Facebook contacts to go for a beer, whilst this was only 3% and 0.3% for LinkedIn and Twitter respectively.

One of the most important pieces of advice came from the data at country level – it is clear that each country had its own level of adoption, as well as driving factors behind usage of online tools. For example, people in the UK are far more likely to use an auction site then web browsers from Brazil and people in South Korea are more likely to search the internet to stay up to date with the latest news, whilst Canadians are more likely to do research or try and find products. As such it is important to tailor your campaigns based on the traits of the local population.

I’ve embedded Tom’s presentation below

Next up was Julian Smith, Group Director Analytics and Insight at Mediaedge:cia, who explored the Active Participants data in more detail. He segmented the data by focusing on the research participants who showed high levels of online engagement through writing blogs, managing a website, posting on Twitter and uploading a video. He called this group the committed contributors.

Thirty five percent of the participants found themselves in this committed contributors group. As indicated in the previous presentation, generation is a good indicator of the level of activity with 16-24 year olds being the most active and activity decreasing with each passing generation.

It may come as no surprise that the more active people were more often asked for recommendations on issues such as films, music and mobile phones. They are also more likely to share their opinion on these issues in an online environment.

The most important finding is that these people are also more open to advertising and branded messages. Not only that, they are also more likely to actively look for information on branded websites, company profiles on Facebook and other official company outlets online.

See his full presentation below

Last up was Anita Caras, head of research at Microsoft Advertising. Key elements of her presentation focused around how brands can be relevant in the new media landscape. Her recommendations: entertain them, hook them up with like minded people and improve their knowledge.

If I was to distil all the information from the night and the research discussed it all comes down to a few very important recommendations:

1) Understand your markets. Usage and adoptions is different for each country, so your campaign needs to be tailored to these regional differences.
2) Be aware of generational differences – younger people tend to be more active than older folks. Keep this in mind when drafting an online strategy – know where and how your target audience communicates.
3) Find the Active Participants – these people are both more likely to share and regarded as trustworthy sources of information
4) People don’t dislike advertising by definition – it’s just up to you to be relevant and add value to the exchange. People are willing to trust your brand, so don’t abuse that trust.
5) Be relevant. This follows up on the previous point, there is a place for brands online, but only if they are willing to play by the rules of the community.

Global Web Index, Active Participants & Brands

In case of the piano stairs 66% more people than normal decided to take the stairs, rather than the escalator and World’s Deepest Bin collected 41kg more trash than the normal bin. Pretty impressive stats for sure, but I’d be interested to find out if they had a long term impact. Will the people who changed their behaviour continue their new choices or will they simply revert back to old habbits once you take the cool experience out of the equation?

Regardless of the long term behavioural impact of the campaign, the above videos show why it is so enormously important for brands to create experiences – it makes them memorable and worth talking about. With an almost limitless amount of choice and an ever increasing amount of brands vying for people’s attention companies need to find new ways to stand out. And Volkswagen have certainly managed to do so.

The videos have amassed over 3,5m views on Youtube alone and over 3,000 links from various blogs and websites.

The only point of critisism is that the English website redirects to the Swedish Volkswagen website. Whilst the campaign has done wonders to increase awareness, and likeability of the brand most likely, it is important to make sure this awareness is converted into a bottom line contribution.

Apart from that this campaign gets a big two thumbs up from The Socialistas!

Fun Experiences To Change Behaviour

Earlier this week I wrote about the campaign by the Danish Tourism board over at Viralblog.com. At the time it was still unclear whether the cry for help was genuine, but many were suspicious. And they were right to be, as it did turn out to be a hoax.

The campaign attracted a lot of critisism for lacking creativity, portraying Denmark as a country of easy women and most importantly, for misleading people. People don’t like to treated as if they are idiots. Nor do they like to be made to feel like a dimwit. And the Danish Tourism Board managed to do both.

Initially Grey, the agency behind the campaign were very pleased with their efforts, saying:

“It is the most successful viral advertising ever. We have cut through the media clutter. It has cost us the same as a 30 second commercial, aired a few times on TV2″

Hyperbole aside (800k views hardly constitutes ‘most successful ever’) I think it’s safe to say this campaign was far from a success. They attracted a lot of attention, but that should not be the goal in itself.

Thankfully, they realised they’d made a mistake and apologised.

Thus Dorte at VisitDenmark: “I am very sorry that the film has offended many people, that wasn’t our intention at all. The goal has been to create positive recall of Denmark and create conversations about Denmark. To prevent offending people any further we have removed the film from youtube.”

But by then it was too late. The video has popped up all over the internet, several potential dads have stepped forward and even Hitler is rumoured to be August’s dad.

Situations like this are exactly why The WOMMA has 3 very simple principles, which they call the Honesty ROI:

Honesty of Relationship
1. How will we ensure bloggers disclose their relationship and participation in this marketing program?

Honesty of Opinion
2. What measures are in place to ensure we are not influencing bloggers to say anything other than their own honest and genuine opinion?

Honesty of Identity
3. Does this program mislead the public in any way that could damage the reputation of our company?

They did not come up with these principles for moral posturing, but to protect brands and the integrity of the internet. It’s a shame that campaigns like these turn people into cynics – the campaign was quickly identified as a hoax. But for every hoax, there may be a real person in need.

Danish Viral Campaign Backfires