Today marks the 30th anniversary of one of the worst business decisions in american business history. The changing of the original recipe for Coke and calling it “New Coke” is probably taught in business classes all over the world on what not to do. I forget how long it took someone to say hey this was a mistake and quickly go back to the old recipe. Probably as long as it took to sell off the old stock on new Coke would be my guess.
While that disaster is fresh in everyones mind today I want to talk about what Coca-cola is doing today with their content strategy plan because it is quite brilliant. We can all learn from them.
The other day I was browsing Twitter and saw one of my photographer mentors Scott Kelby tweet out a link to a post he did on the Coca-Cola blog. First thing I said to myself was Coca-Cola has a blog? What they heck do they blog about. They have had the same can forever and the same recipe, it must be a bitch to try to come up with content to talk about a brand of soda.
My new post for CocaCola just went live. Hope you can check it out. ๐ https://t.co/Vv7xCLIWSf
— Scott Kelby (@ScottKelby) April 23, 2015
When I went and read Scotts post I was blown away. Not by the great pictures because I knew that would be a given but after I read the post I went back to the main section of the Coca Cola blog and discovered a million “List post” just like Scotts 7 great places to celebrate Earth day.
Their plan seems to be get influential people and let them write the post and help them spread it around. Scott has 256k followers on Twitter alone and I am sure he shared it with all his other social media accounts as well. It really is a brilliant way to get content that is on a topic people will be searching for “Earth Day” and have someone that has a lot of followers help spread it around.
My question is how hard is this to do? I bet you can find some people in your niche or a complimentary niche and do this until the cows come home. This brand has it really going on when it comes to content. Scott's post is already #9 in Google for “Celebrate Earth Day” and I am sure it will move up once all the photographers that follow Scott give the post some social media love and maybe some backlinks. Heck the post is so well done the media may pick up on it every year. I am sure Coca Cola will be using this post every Earth day forever.