Friday, June 8, 2007

Using Mobile Marketing for Social Networking


The Coca-Cola Company is hoping its new mobile site for social networking, Sprite Yard, will become the MySpace of the cellphone world. This is reported in an article from Commercial Alert.

Over the past 2 weeks, we've discussed Mobile Marketing a lot. Well, Coca Cola is about to dive into this area-- head-first -- with their new mobile site. According to Mark Greatrex, Senior VP for Marketing Communications and Insights of Coca-Cola, "People will type in codes from Sprite bottle caps to redeem original content, like ring tones and short video clips called mobisodes. Recently, one of the most redeemed prizes from Coca-Cola promotions has been virtual clothing and furniture to use in virtual online worlds." Yes, we now have other worlds for our alter-egos (i.e., Second Life) to vicariously live through. Coca-Cola is definitely using cutting-edge marketing here.

It will be interesting to see how widely and quickly Sprite Yard is adopted by teens. Not many big companies have been brave enough to do this to date, and those who have tried have had mixed results. For example, BudTV (introduced by Anheuser Busch last February with original content), is cited by the article as having lagging web traffic.

However, the fact that Coca-Cola is the first to really commit to using mobile as part of their marketing mix is a good sign that this may become a viable channel for direct marketers. Kudos to Coke for being pioneers in this exciting new space!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You hate to see the corporate world enter the mobile socail network. With thenm comes a lot of spam and advertisements. I like mobile socail networking as a prvate thing for my friends aand i. Not to know what new flavor coke is putting out.