Modern Idea

You can’t fault them, really. Nearly every large company is paying “Web 2.0 consultants” to develop a strategy to profit off the captive audiences found on Facebook and other lesser social networking sites. Thus far, this has consisted of transparent attempts to persuade people to add commercials to their profile pages. A successful widget strategy must keep in mind that there are 27,977 Facebook applications as of the time of this writing. Guess how many of the top 100 applications are made by traditional product or service companies? Just one—two if you count Hot or Not as a traditional company. Do you?

A successful widget strategy must either provide value or entertain its users—or it will go nowhere. Product marketers and brand managers must put as much effort into one of these two areas as they do their self-serving interests such as determining how to increase the brand impact.

Coca-Cola just launched CokeTag, a widget that allows you to put up to 25 links on your profile page, separated into 5 categories. Admittedly this could be useful. Below you’ll see an abhorrent design. To Coke’s credit, this was the only theme that was a blatant attempt to brand. There are several others that would fit nicely in any page.

I won’t get into the aspects of the widget that were put in place to make it more viral, but it is worth checking out from an academic standpoint. One thing that was surprising to me is how the term “CokeTag” made it through Coca-Cola’s legal approval process. They have defended the term “Coke” as a trademark for some time and for good reason. If this is a runaway success we’ll be coke’ing our favorite sites, just as we now google things we need to find. I know this is highly unlikely but I would expect Coca-Cola’s legal team to have more eyes on this. For instance, where’s the ™ on the CokeTag logo at the top?

My favorite coke is Diet Pepsi. There, I’ve said it!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 10th, 2008 at 9:03 pm and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.