When you visit the Coca-Cola (US) website, you don’t get an ordinary, company website.
Instead you find yourself at Coke “Journey” which looks and feels like a lifestyle magazine. And that’s the point.
This is no bland, corporate site. This is brand journalism.
Coca-Cola is a 120 year old company and in 2010 made the decision to change its communication style to remain relevant in the age of digital media.
They hired journalists for their social storytelling skills and created an internal newsroom; a media entity covering Coke, not Coke PR. In 2012 they launched “Journey” as their corporate web presence.
Don’t talk about yourself all the time
Interestingly only half of the “Journey” content is about Coke, the other half covers topics aligned with their brand and business, that interest their customers.
Coca-Cola’s tip: Find the top 10 search keywords that relate to your brand and take ownership of them – for Coca-Cola, this includes food, business, sports, careers, innovation, history, sustainability and brands.
These keywords underpin story development to ensure they are publishing interesting content for readers.
Are we in agriculture talking about the things that are important to our customers? Or are we only talking about ourselves?
Find your stories from within, but always focus on your audience
Developing content that does not explicity pitch, or sell, is the next challenge.
In sourcing story ideas, Coca-Cola often use their staff to provide inspiration or content but not in the way you might expect.
Check out the contributors to “Going Big in Dallas: 15 Insider Tips on Traveling to Texas."
Interested in the mocktail trend? So is Coke…
Tough Mudder? Coke is there too.
Earth Hour? Yep.
All of these stories are entertaining, informative and focus on the customer.
And talk about great SEO! You will find these articles without Googling anything to do with Coke.
How can we tell agriculture’s stories without them being about farming practices, weather or landscapes?
Who are the farmers doing interesting things outside agriculture that create a new audience for our industries?
Join the conversation
Along with publishing content based on their customers’ interests, Coca-Cola also participate in a range of social communities including Throwback Thursday (#tbt) on Instagram and Twitter where they share images from their archives.
They actively engage in conversations happening elsewhere, even if they are not specifically about their brand.
Are those farmers who post old photos of machinery and on-farm practices tagging them #tbt?
Could we be doing more to engage different audiences in non-agricultural hashtag conversations?
Stop begging the media, BE the media.
This is the catch-cry of content marketers, led by Mark Ragan.
Coca-Cola proactively develop “Journey” content to pitch journalists. If it doesn’t get a run in the media, they still have content for their site.
They also go online to respond to negative media. This gives them the chance to respond to issues quickly, in their own words and without the need for press conferences or media releases.
See this example and note they make them highly shareable, enabling their message to be spread more widely than if it just appeared in news outlets.
This is not an “anti-media” approach as it assists journalists prepare their own stories with publicly available comment from the company.
Should agricultural peak bodies and agribusinesses be opening digital newsrooms and covering their industries as journalists, instead of doing industry PR?
Could agriculture’s concerns about metropolitan media coverage of the live export ban have been countered by having our own digital newsrooms?
Food for thought.
I heard the Coke Journey story when I was in Florida attending the Ragan Communications Social Media for Corporate Communications and Public Relations Conference at Disney World, 2-4 April 2014.
The presentation from Coca-Cola was by Jay Moye, senior writer and editor of Coke Journey.