Coca-Cola has updated their social media policies (or principles, as Coca-Cola is calling them).  Guess what? The policies are only 3 pages in length.  Yep, that’s it. 3 pages.  One of the largest brands in the world that sells into 200 countries with dozens of products and billions of dollars in revenue has figured out how to boil their social media policies down to only the nitty gritty.

The policy encompasses a total of 20 points that are broken out into 3 key areas:

• 5 Core Values of the Company in the Online Social Media Community
• 5 Expectations for Associates’ Personal Behavior in Online Social Media
• 10 Expectations for Online Spokespeople

Adam Brown, the head of social media at Coca-Cola, explains the framework for these new guidelines in an interview with Andy Sernovitz.  If you can’t view this video, you can grab it over on YouTube.

If you want to read Coca-Cola’s new social media policy, you can either read it below or grab it over on Scribd.
Coca-Cola Company’s Online Social Media Principles

At New Marketing Labs I recently had someone from a small to medium company contact me and asked if we could review their social media policy. While we didn’t end up working with the company, their social media policy was 41 pages and 3 slide decks. I think my buddy C.C. Chapman summarized it the best after he tweeted out the link to Conrad Lisco’s post about Coca-Cola’s new policies:

For Coca-Cola, this new policy was updating an older set of guidelines that they had already in place.  But, over the course of 2010 we’ll continue to see more brands adopting social media policies.  What I found really interesting is how Adam talked about that it was a combination of several teams that came together to boil their social media policy into a 3 page document meant to serve as a set of 5 commitments from the company and 15 guidelines.

Has your company adopted a social media policy yet?  What are your thoughts on Coca-Cola’s new policies?

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