Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Plenty of people have said it before, but Coca-Cola had invested hard dollars to prove it. Online buzz is not enough to have a measurable impact on short-term sales. Online display advertising works better. While the concept seems to contradict what social media enthusiasts tend to tout, it's one of several studies that not only raise questions about the growing interest in online influence but also refute it. After all, if buzz doesn't drive short-term sales where display advertisements might, then what about influence?

Smart companies don't make decisions based on single studies. Of course, according to the Adweek article, Coca-Cola isn't ready to toss out the baby with the bath water. Its digital media team points out that the findings were based on one study with one segment of one company that appeals to a particular customer.

In this case, one with 61.5 million Facebook fans. Instead, Coca-Cola will continue to look for ways to measure online buzz and other popular social media counts such as video views and social sharing. The company, one of the early entrants into digital media, wants to find a predictive measure that can pinpoint financial outcomes — at least so marketers may better understand the tradeoffs among media types....

It's shameful so many brands still ask social media to deliver likes, fans, followers, views and channel performance indicators, not real business results.

It's 2013. Social media is no longer new. It's a mature medium, one that has been woven into the fabric of consumer life online. So why are brands still determined to act like naive tourists, blundering around a foreign land and upsetting the natives? It's time to take back control. Brands have been lectured for the last few years on the need to let go of the vice-like grip on their brand, to hand over control to their customers in social media. And it's true that social media has ushered in a new age of transparency, where customers want a far greater stake in any brand they interact with....