How Refreshing.

Coca-Cola has launched a new social media policy, or “social media principles” as they like to call them. Three pages of twenty “down and dirty” principles broken down into three categories.

The first has five principles of what Coca-Cola as a company commit to doing in the social media space; transparency, disclosure, safeguarding their consumers information etc.

The second category surrounds the guidelines and principles for official media spokespeople, and those who wish to be an official media spokeperson have to go through a social media certification class, this time covering then principles, again including such issues as transparency, disclosure and so on.

The third category contains a further five principles for those who are not official spokespeople but general associates of the company, which amount to over 1million. This is when these individuals are not acting on behalf of the company but come across a Facebook post or a Tweet or something in the social media space that either concerns or excites them, and how they should best interact with these conversations.

They say it’s about empowering their ambassadors and associates to be able to communicate but at the same time not giving them a bit too much rope that something goes tragically wrong.

I guess you could see this as rather encouraging to see such a major multinational conglomorate open its eyes and give power to the people but something inside is twinging at me to think otherwise.

Part of me questions whether they are merely playing the system and turning ‘social media’ into just another form of ‘corporate media’. The best line may be where it says “always remember who we are (a marketing company)”, not a soft drinks company.  

Perhaps just my cynical side. Maybe I should be truly congratulating Coca-Cola to take this step when other major companies continue to ban Facebook and Twitter in the office. A large corporate organisation integrating social media into their existing principles of communication. Social media is certainly not a new concept or seperate ’thing’ its an evolution of digitally connected communication that all companies at some point will need to address.

It could be said that many will learn by the early adopters and their success or failures but they will gain ground on competitors by taking the lead! Nevertheless it’s never too late to get your foot on the ladder and do this by developing a strategic digital pr.