Coca Cola’s ORM Fiasco

Coca Cola are underestimating the importance of their online reputation. They’ve started legal proceedings against blogger Jason Bagley for running the consumer blog “My Coke Fest” .

Comments on the blog combined with multiple posts on Twitter and Muti show that the online community is outraged and are backing the South African blogger.

From Twitter:

On the other hand many feel that Coca Cola has every right to request that Jason take down the site because of its deceptively official look and ownership of the official domain name. This has allowed the unofficial blog to profit from Google Adsense advertising revenues and create its own My Coke Fest positioning.

Jason, who was kind enough to answer some questions after publishing his last post on the My Coke Fest blog, says that it was “not his intention to cybersquat or try and steal Coke’s thunder”.  He and a friend started the site in 2007 in order to fill a gap regarding festival information. In hindsight, though, he would have tried to collaborate with Coke from the beginning. Although some promising talks had been held with Coke employees in charge of the festival, these were sidelined once the legal team became involved.

Jason has been successful with other collaborative sites such as The Virgin Fest blog where the organisers were willing to work with him by providing information, tickets, pictures and articles for the event. 

The success of his “My Coke” blog is almost unprecedented in South Africa. One of his previous posts had over 2500 comments and the blog site itself is listed 1st and 2nd for a My Coke Fest search and 3rd for a Coke search. The official Coca Cola My Coke Fest site is not even listed above the fold on the Search engine results page.

Jason believes his site has been so popular because, contrary to the official site, it has been around since almost the beginning - offering fans a voice to discuss their passion for music. His advice to Coca Cola in terms of Search Engine Marketing and Social Media in the future is to “stick to one website and build a festival around it.” The success of his blog can be attributed to allowing user participation and user generated content such as blogs, forums, polls and competitions. Coca Cola should be utilising all of the Social Media channels available to them and encouraging maximum exposure by engaging with Facebook groups and fan blogs.

Although Jason has been targeted by Coca Cola for setting up the My Coke blog, the fans have shown their support.  In fact he says that “some fans have gone so far as to say they have torn up their tickets and have written to Coke themselves.” He believes that Coca Cola have hurt their online reputation because they have not focused on to the importance of their online consumers, rather prioritising their bottom line.

Jason does however, remain open to future collaboration.

“I do believe that Coke could have handled the whole situation a lot better. Sure, I made mistakes, but nothing that could not be fixed pretty easily. I was and still am very open to discussions with them. Blogs are powerful mediums and their ORM has definitely taken a knock, not because of me running the blog, but because they want to shut it down.”