cocacola | Justin Levy

Coca-Cola’s Happiness Machine

Imagine if you walked up to a vending machine, dropped in a couple dollars, made your selection and a soda popped out. Seems completely normal, right? Now, what if another soda came out. Possibly the computer on the fritz but kinda cool, huh? But, what if it kept spitting out soda after soda, started pouring the soda for you into a glass, gave you some flowers and a pizza? Think that would cause a group of people to gather ’round the vending machine? Of course it would. Now, what if that was all captured on video and shared online. High chance of going viral? Yep.

Well, that is exactly what Coca-Cola has done as part of their “Open Happiness” global marketing campaign.

As MediaPost explains:

Coke set up a special vending machine on a real college campus and rolled footage of students’ surprised and delighted reactions as the machine proceeded to dispense everything from free bottles of Coke to flowers, a whole pizza, a six-foot sub and balloon animals.

Coke couldn’t have scripted better responses: Students laugh and jump, pass the Cokes and gifts around, and even thank Coke as they hug the vending machine. But the footage is “all real students and real reactions,” according to Christy Amador, digital marketing manager, Coca-Cola global interactive marketing.

The video is the first video that Coca-Cola has released that was created solely for digital distribution without use in TV ads. Want to know if it was a success for Coca-Cola? Well, in the week since the video has gone live on YouTube, it has received over 700,000+ views.

Without further ado, here is the hilarious video from St. John’s University. If you can’t view this video, head over to YouTube.

Coca-Cola has been garnering a lot of applause from the social media community as of late, first, with the release of their 3 page social media policy and now with this.

Do you like the concept? How could other brands learn from what Coca-Cola has been doing?

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Coca-Cola Adopts New Social Media Policies

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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