HOW FAR GOES SM RISKS?

COCA-COLA VS FACEBOOK

Coca-Cola Company is largely involved in SM. Through Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, LinkedIn… the company is trying to be open and communicated the maximum possible with its customer. For instance, Coca-Cola’s Facebook page is as international as the company it self. For each country, Coca cola has a Page with all the national events and news. Through its Facebook pages, you get to know the company, its history, its events, its new products, and its sponsored events…. Beyond, the nationalization of Facebook pages, the company went to the creation of pages by product like Coca-Cola vanilla, cocacolazero…

Yet, this wide openness to SM undergoes many risks. For the purpose of my blog, let us focus on the risks of using Facebook:

Brand Squatting:

The company brand has being imitated in some pages in Facebook. Which may mislead its customers. In fact, while looking for Coca-Cola, you would find many with Coca-Cola as a user name. example: http://www.facebook.com/cocacola.cocacolazero

Risk of Corporate Content and brand image:

Customer perspective:

How many videos are criticized in Facebook? How many ads are not well perceived by customers? By sharing videos, pictures and new products, Coca-Cola open it self to open criticism of its customers and thus may help the spread of a negative word of mouth marketing.

Employees’ perspective:

In most of Facebook pages, employees interact very efficiently and animate its pages. As an example, in birthdays of a national COCA-COLA page many of its employee’s posts their wishes. Yet, some of employees’ comments cannot be monitored nor efficiently managed, which implies the possibility of posting delicate information through simple comments. Like commenting a product by using internal information, which is externally sensitive. Employees are stakeholders and they may hold sensitive pictures, videos or information. Thus, sharing any of them in unmonitored way may damage the company’s brand image.

Unrealistic expectations of customer service:

In fact, using Facebook is very demanding

Why recurrent and active participation is a must! : a major point about Facebook is communication. Most of its users, whenever they questions they expect a quick answer. To impress its customers Coca-Cola should be creative, innovative and very involved with its community. The risk of failing to that is to disconnect from the community and the loss of the attachment to the brand

Why frequent update of the page is a necessity! the update of the profile picture, the continuous upload of pictures and updates of status and the recurrent social events impress the target or actual consumer and show the dynamic and the social implication of a company. Failing to meet the update requirement of Facebook reflect a negative , flat and far boring image of a company, this is not the image of Coca-Cola. Thus, activity and reactivity in Facebook should be an every second style for Coca-Cola.

the company hold a diverse number of pages. Thus managing them is more difficult. Answering all expectations and requirements of Facebook use is a risk on itself. A failing to answer any of its customers’ expectations may harm the core of the brand message and make the community a fragile platform.

Conclusion

SM is a double-edged sword, it is the most efficient way to create a wide range of funs and to spread brand awareness, as it is the quickest way to spread criticism and harm a company’s image. Thus, the use of any SM tool or Facebook needs a close observation and a dynamic management. Some researchers went far and advise companies to establish a crisis strategy to overcome any possible harmful risk of SM.