Read the article here
Coca Cola has announced a hunt for an agency to help with social media monitoring. Ad Age reports that currently 20 companies are in contention and vying for the chance to monitor billion dollar brands such as: Coke, Diet Coke, Sprite, Minute Maid, Powerade, Vitamin Water and Dasani. "Our goal is to identify a consistent agency and format for conducting social-media monitoring," Kerry Tressler, a Coca-Cola spokeswoman said. "We want to yield the most information about what consumers are saying about our brands, so we know what they are looking for."
Some executives in the ad world are likening Coca-Cola's strategy to that of Gatorade's "Mission Control" initiative last year. Gatorade dedicated an actual space, complete with monitoring screens and analytic tools to follow social media discussions of their products in real time. Such efforts led to Gatorade's new advertisements.
This story is of particular interest for the future of advertising within large corporations. With the advents of Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and other social media resources companies are changing the way they analyze their consumer. Immediate feedback, criticism and praise of their products and media usage is now a standard. The future of social media monitoring may lead to a more discursive and engaging atmosphere between producer and customer but also lends itself to the possibility of over invasion into consumer life by a corporation.
Great post, Justin! (And ten points for the embedded link and the image!) It's come up again and again in your classmates' posts--social media is changing virtually every "traditional" media industry. I'm always interested in considering the potential of these social media movements--it seems to me that social media works best when it's organic, rather than when an industry tries to appropriate it for its own needs. (Consider when companies ask ad agencies to create a viral video for them--the point of viral video is that it happens naturally, not institutionally!)
ReplyDeleteGreat food for thought!