Coca-Cola is getting set to dump press releases. They’ve found something better. Brand journalism, of which I approve, as it can be a powerful tool when used correctly. As this Ragan piece demonstrates, there is a paradigm shift coming:
Perhaps you caught the story in Mashable, The Daily Mail, Adweek, or The Huffington Post.
Coca-Cola’s Singapore team designed a novel double can that
splits into two, so customers can share the fizzy beverage with a friend.Fantastic PR. But one major reason it got so much play was “because we covered it,” says Ashley Brown, who leads digital communications and social media for The Coca-Cola Company.
The rest of the piece is worth reading, do check it out if you are interested in journalism, public relations or marketing.
Here’s something of an example at Auburn:
Nosa Eguae just graduated with his first degree and his pursuing a second while finishing up his playing days terrorizing quarterbacks. The guy is 22, telling you the children are our future. Here you see him away from the field, the roaring crowd and the mixed life of a student/celebrity, like he is pretty much everywhere in town.
Auburn’s athletic department is putting considerable resources toward telling stories like this, humanizing the young man behind the face mask:
I shot that of him at an equestrian meet last year.
Every team has at least a handful or more of hardworking, successful on-and-off-the field people like Eguae. We should see more of the great stories our institutions are producing in the young men and women that attend there. This is one of the great victories a university can demonstrate to the world, after all.
(Samford does a good job of this, too. They have an incredibly strong social media presence and interaction with all of the university’s various stakeholders. Freshmen are published on the university’s home page. The athletes are widely accessible. There’s even a reality show being shot on campus by the students in our department. There are plans in place to expand on those efforts, too.)
Here is the other side of the “branded” coin. One must find the right balance of telling stories to your multiple audiences and working alongside the traditional (and nontraditional) media. No one has arrived at a formula for this, but you have to develop a deft touch. Otherwise, you might hear about it, as you’ll see in the first of these two quick links:
Photojournalists want better access to the White House
Obama’s Image Machine: Monopolistic Propaganda Funded by You
And, finally, this: When an artist allowed her 4-year-old daughter to finish her drawings, something awesome happened. Great art there.
And that’s enough for one night. I’m tuckered.
