CokeTag and My Thoughts

Full Disclosure: The Coca-Cola Company is a client of The Advance Guard and we are currently working with them around the CokeTag initiative.

I’m going to be honest that when I first saw the CokeTag application my reaction was along the lines of “nice and easy to use, but it would be better if it wasn’t only on Facebook.”

CokeTagIt is never fun when you first see something new from a potential client and that is what you say. But, when asked for an opinion on something I always speak from the heart. The best part is that they were ready for that and explained to me that Facebook was just the beginning.

CokeTag went live as a beta starting on Facebook in conjunction with promoting their we8 Artists and there are plans to expand through the OpenSocial network and then perhaps beyond. You can read more about this on the CokeTag announcement page.

I was happy to hear this because any time you can manage content from one place and it expands out to update everywhere is a good thing. Simplicity in keeping data updated across the web is a feature I’m always looking for more of.

I’ve added a CokeTag to my personal profile (as shown here) and you can also add them to any Facebook Page as well. That for me is where I see this being really useful.

As a music junkie and indie music supporter, I love any time a new tool comes out that helps an artist get more exposure.

If an artist or band has a Facebook Fan page they could create a CokeTag and fill it with links to their concert calendar, links to buy their music, podcasts that have played their tunes, band blog, fan pages, photos or anything else they could think of. THEN any fan could grab that CokeTag and put it on their personal profile to show their support for the band. That is the part I love.

It is similar to hanging a band poster up on your bedroom wall, except now it can be updated by the band whenever they have new information they want to promote. That final piece is where the power is in my opinion.

I find myself tweaking mine on a regular basis to figure out which links to put in. I think I might have finally got it, but I’m not sure.

If you come up with a creative use for a CokeTag let me know about it so I can check it out. I’ve already seen it used to share details about a wedding which is certainly an angle I hadn’t thought of.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 19th, 2008 at 8:02 am and is filed under Clients. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

  • Michael - very cool. Perhaps you can put a My Coke Rewards panel inside the CokeTag widget. That'd make it instantly useful to me.
  • I hear you Chris, but I think you and I are would be considered "power users" of Internet tools and thus raise questions like this.

    But, for the average user, band, organization or company on Facebook the idea of being able to easily package up a whole bunch of links an share it with their community is a powerful one.

    I'm looking forward to the first Charity of Non-Profit that uses this to keep their supporters updated. Or someone to use it as a fund raising vehicle to drive traffic to information and donation pages.

    The more I step back and think about different ways this could be used the more I get excited about the potential.
  • Michael Donnelly
    Yup, we are listening Chris and appreciate your feedback on CokeTag which we expect will have many more applications for both consumers and advertisers once it becomes truly portable across the web on other social networks and blogs like yours. :-)

    I also promise to share your comments on our My Coke Rewards site with those responsible as they are always looking for ways to improve the user experience.

    Thanks Again for taking the time to write and sharing your feedback…as I always say...We can't learn from it unless we hear about it, so please continue to tell us the good and the bad so that we can continue to learn together and make improvements.
  • Funny, my first reaction was "why should I use this instead of del.icio.us/friendfeed/twitter/stumbleupon/digg?" and that's still the question I'm left with. Friendfeed shares links with Facebook AND the items appear in newsfeeds, making them far more promotional.

    Until CokeTag *does* something, I can't see any reason to use it.

    Now on the other hand, if Coke would like to do something nice for me and solve a problem that I have, perhaps they could make an HTML-based Coke Points application (instead of the slow, ugly, Flash based one) that lets you put in more than 10 codes a DAY.



    Coke - are you listening?
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All views expressed on this site are those of C.C. Chapman and not any company, group or activity that I am associated with.