The last two days I’ve been around at the iStrategy event in Berlin. Lots of global companies attended as this event to share their knowledge and experiences in the area of social media. Digital experts spoke about the rapid growth of social networking and mobile web and merging this into innovative and creative online strategies. How to navigate through the marketing mix and forge ahead of the competition.

I’ve picked up a lot of good learnings and insights during this event. This first blog is about the Coca Cola presentation on day #1 of this event. It’s a roundup of speakers, what they brought up and all tweets by other delegates. Thanks to all for their live tweets, good to recap what’s been on during the event! I will be covering other presentations during the coming few days. Think this summarizes at least the speakers and workshops I’ve been to. Feel free to comment or leave your views.

Going from traditional campaigning to constant engagement

The Amazing World of Coca Cola, read more.

The first day started with a keynote by Michael Donnelly, he’s the Group Director of Coca Cola’s Worldwide Interactive Marketing. Selling one of the most popular drinks ever, Coca-Cola could easily rest of its laurels, but the company is constantly evolving and transforming itself. Have a look at this infographic showing The Amazing World of Coca Cola.

Michael took the attendees through Coca Cola’s ways of working in marketing and social media in a very open presentation. He thinks there are no real experts on social media yet, everybody is still exploring and learning. Interesting view he flagged up regarding the change of traditional marketing/advertising : we’re going from campaigns to constant engagement. The social space gives the possibility to leverage sustainable relationships. With campaigning you’re putting energy and budget into something that exists for a couple of weeks and relationships you build are gone afterwards. It’s silly to start from zero time and time again.

Social media management is a tactic, not a strategy

Social media management in a couple of bullets according to Coca Cola:

• It’s a tactic, not a strategy
• Keep it simple, don’t overcomplicate concepts
• Moderation is must (Coca Cola is using this Canadian moderation company for them)
• Always work with professionals
• Clear legal hurdles first
• Each new community is an entirely new market, treat is as such
• Listen, learn, scale. Again, again and again. You’re never there.
• How to embed in your organization? Have social media principles. Just guidelines, don’t write a book. Find the Coca Cola social media principles here.

Use existing platforms and bring all your activity together

Coca Cola is focusing on their fans in almost all of their marketing activities. They now “Share Happiness” next to their global sponsorship and advertising. It’s less about Coca Cola, more about their fans. Very simple. A good, viral showcase of this approach, watch here. To make use of their fan base all of their marketing activity sits on existing platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. With regards to Facebook, everything is under one Facebook page, even local initiatives. A good learning from here: make use of existing  platforms and bring all of your activity together, don’t separate it.

Update: Coke’s ‘fans first’ approach in social media | presentation