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How Coke and Pepsi are wasting their online strategy

November 28, 2008 By Dan Thornton 5 Comments

I have to admit that as a non-coffee drinker, I’m pretty addicted to caffeinated soft drinks. To the point where I’ve just shocked myself by working out that, in conjunction with my partner, we spend about £957 per year just on Coke or Pepsi! The fact that I can happily switch between the two main brands without any hesitation probably also makes me a reasonable target for online marketing.

Pepsi:

Pepsi can by schnaars (CC licence)

Pepsi has recently launched a social media promotion to engage bloggers around a new Pepsi logo. They picked 25 top social media and marketing bloggers, sent them empty cans featuring all the previous designs, some full cans with the new design, and even a DVD of history of Pepsi. The approach had some criticism (why target the social media/marketing niche rather than the fans of Pepsi niche?), but the response was fairly favourable – see Jennifer Laycock and Chris Brogan for more. And they even started a room in FriendFeed – The Pepsi Cooler – and that’s where my problem lies.

Pretty quickly people saw the flaw in a room which only allowed contributions from 5 people, and enforced moderation for all comments. You can see some responses to Chris Brogan’s post. The fact that Edelman’s Steve Rubel was involved meant that there was a fairly quick response claiming it’s the tip of the iceberg, and the team were working quickly to approve comments.

The first problem has been that the team are all U.S based – so no approval for 12 hours if you’re in the wrong timezone. I did make the suggestion of getting a representative from other countries involved.
The second is that a topic effectively has to be discussed in the comment of something irrelevant, in the hope the 5 contributors will write about it – I wanted to chat about the fact Pepsi cans in the UK now came with QR codes on them on November 17 – but Bart, who acknowledged by comment appears to have disappeared since then.
The third is that with 5 contributors, there just isn’t the flow of content,contribution and conversation to keep any interest going. There’s now just a contribution every 3 days, which is pretty slow – and hardly anyone is commenting.

Put it like this – if I had a community of 312 members, I’d be pretty disapointed if only 5 of them posted, and only once every three days. They’ve said that ‘we need to make sure the conversation is clean, free of profanity, and does not have any personal attacks’, but if you’re using Friendfeed after targetting 25 leading social media bloggers, you’re not likely to be overun by flame wars!

It’s good that Pepsi has started trying to engage the blogosphere as part of their overall marketing strategy, and that they at least discussed and made a slight attempt to have some conversations – but it’s a akin to listening to Pepsi shouting at us through a megaphone, and then trying to chat back with a sore throat.

Coke:

Coke Machine by KB35 (CC licence)

It’s lucky Coke have also managed to make a mess of things, because it nicely balances the post! Way back in June,08, I wrote about the CokeZone loyalty scheme, which allows users to input a code found on Coke bottles to be rewarded with points, which can then be exchanged for a range of products – some of which are rather good. The problem I had, was that the site was incredibly unreliable and frustrating to use. Things may have improved slightly, but there are still bugs with entering login details, and the site moves at the same speed as evolution.

Luckily, I haven’t actually been fired for using cokezone, which happened to some Coke employees who accidentally infringed an employee limit on collecting points while they boosted and promoted the service (Shel Holtz has all the details).

But they have turned a scheme which was meant to promote loyalty into one of immense frustration.

About a week ago, I happened to be logging into the site to register some more codes when I caught sight of an offer for a Flip Mino on the homepage – with options to enter to win for 2 points, or get one for 300 points. It was something I wanted to make sure I got, so I thought I’d try to collect the extra 100 points I needed (33 1/3 2litre bottles worth!). Now it did state that there was a limited number of the Minos, but bearing in mind there’s been a message saying ‘hurry, just a few left’ on various T-shirts etc since about the time I joined in April or so, I thought there’d be a bit of time.

But there wasn’t.

Turns out it’s a special pre-Christmas promotion with a new product each week. So either all the Flips were handed out or they’ve just been deleted.

So after swearing and realising my mistake, I thought I’d check for some contact details, and maybe try a bit of pleading in case there was one left in a cupboard somewhere.

Now read the following very carefully:

In 2008, on an onlineregistered members loyalty scheme for a major global corporation, with an unreliable site, and transactions to the value of games consoles etc, the contact details for the site are by telephone or post. No email, Facebook, Twitter, GetSatisfaction or Uservoice page. Post or phone! Oh, and some FAQs – (How were people asking these Frequently Asked Questions? And where’s the one for ‘My God, is this the most unreliable site ever?)

How to fix this stuff:

The Pepsi Fix: Allow everyone to contribute and chat. Employ moderation after the event, only if it becomes legally necessary, or of a personal or offensive nature. Employ someone to do the moderation if you need to, or get volunteers around the world to spend an hour each day. And try and make sure there are some Pepsi responses more than once every 3 days. That way, you’ll find the Pepsi fans, not just the top bloggers in a category by ranking.

The Coke Fix: Ideally, remove some of the flashy yet unreliable gubbins and make the site simpler to use. Make the Ts and Cs regarding a week long competition really, really clear, because when a site takes as long to load as yours, I don’t spend any more time on the homepage than necessary. And for the love of God, put some useful contact details or customer service on there!

Two companies with whom I’ve spent significant amounts of money have both engaged with plans which should, on the face of it, been right up my street. And yet somehow, it’s resulted in me realising how much I’ve spent, and the potential health risks of overindulging, because of the quick research I did before composing this post, and because they didn’t commit and go the whole way. And there’s nothing worse than getting halfway to somewhere, stopping, and turning round again.

And do it quick, before I start loading my shopping trolley with bottled water or lemonade

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Filed Under: social media marketing, Uncategorized Tagged With: blogger, blogs, codes, coke, cokezone, contact, contacts, design, employees, fired, flip mino, friendfeed, logo, loyalty, marketing, outreach, pepsi, pepsi cooler, promotion, rewards, social media, social media marketing, steve rubel, Uncategorized, unreliability

A ranting return from reality

June 22, 2008 By Dan Thornton 1 Comment

I’ve had a bit of an unintended break from blogging, despite my best intentions. But even though alcohol and pretending to be a tourist in London hit my productivity, I didn’t escape social media entirely. Main because I spent the week with a very good friend I hadn’t seen in 10 years, having lost touch shortly after I returned to the UK after time studying in the U.S. And the only way we got back in touch was via Myspace at the start of the year! Strangely within a couple of weeks, my friend had already converted to Facebook, and I can only guess Twitter will be next…

It was actually quite funny coming online today to find my lack of social media information streaming at me meant I was quite challenged to start writing. There’s definitely a benefit to having 100s of contacts and RSS feeds – the struggle is to use them for something more original than copying and pasting…

Luckily, there’s always something irritating enough to be worth posting about. In this case, it’s Coca Cola seemingly running an online loyalty scheme which has some serious usability issues. As someone who drinks Coke to excess (I don’t do tea or coffee!), I was quite interested to see what I could get by entering the codes on empty bottles – even more so when I realised that enough time could net me an Xbox game. And yet there’s one slight problem.

The chuffing site never lets me log in! I thought it was a Firefox problem at first, but it’s also b0rked in Internet Explorer. It refuses my password, and then strangely starts asking me to enter my email address in the password field! So I have about 30 empty coke bottles sat around waiting for me to redeem them…thanks Coke.

(It appears that this seemingly simple to spot problem isn’t the only one people have with Coke zone).

N:B: Oddly enough, I retried logging in to verify the fault exists, and now Firefox allows me in, whilst Internet Explorer stops me…

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Filed Under: usability Tagged With: coca cola, coke, coke zone, free, logging in, loyalty scheme, problem, rewards, signing in, usability

You can’t control communities – but you should inspire them

June 10, 2008 By Dan Thornton 8 Comments

I went to an interesting discussion group today – unfortunately I arrived late, so I’m not sure how much I can disclose, and I also missed all the introductions.

But there were a range of people in positions of authority for digital products, services and communities from a range of institutions, both commercial and governmental.

And what I can talk about is the fact that we’re still debating whether brand owners should be prepared to relinquish control of what is created, published and discussed on their digital products.

Here’s something shocking:

You can’t, and you don’t control ‘your’ community. Never have. Never will.

The reason is that ‘your’ community isn’t just the people you moderate on your forum, or the people creating content that you can edit and publish. ‘Your’ community is spread far and wide, and comprises of everyone who has any type of interaction with your brand, product or service. At it’s most tenuous, it’s seeing someone in branded clothing, and your opinion of them informing your opinion about that brand – and discussing that offline, on forums, on Instant Messaging services, and where-ever your conversations are.

Now try and convince me that you’re able to moderate and control everything someone does, everywhere they go? (Obviously I will accept arguments by Chinese Government officials…)

You should look to inspire communities:

This isn’t a new concept. The ideals of inspirational figures have been remembered and followed long after the names of those who tried to control/persecute/murder them. Pick whichever example is most relevant, from Jesus, through Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

If you want a certain type of content produced, or certain types of interaction, you need to plan to inspire your community to predominantly produce it. Whether it’s seeding a community with the right content, rewarding it (with fame or fortune), or simply being a part of the community in the manner which you would like to see, there are plenty of ways to do it – but don’t expect everyone to follow the example.

The only time I can ever advocate control and moderation is in the face of legal issues or persecution of individuals or groups. But this has to be accompanied by free and open explanation of the reasons for your actions. If not, the best case will be an annoyed user. At worst, you could see a forum revolt. Just look at the example of Sony HD DVD codes on Digg.com.

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