Katrina Klier's Blog

I had a wonderful time this week at an executive women’s networking breakfast sponsored by the great folks at Accenture and Starbucks. It is always a pleasure to be surrounded by other smart and lively people (of course the coffee certainly helped).

The main topic at the event was resilience.  How executives define resilience, examples from their careers and why it is important. This led to a conversation on the difference between mentors and sponsors.  Everyone needs both for a great career, yet most people don’t pause to consider the differences between them for their career, nor do they understand how these people can help them be resilient.   So what is the difference between a mentor and a sponsor?

Mentor:  A wise and trusted counselor or teacher; someone who imparts wisdom to and shares knowledge with a less experienced colleague. (exchange of knowledge and wisdom)

Sponsor:  An individual or group that provides support for an individual or organization, similar to a benefactor; Someone who provides access to opportunities to benefit another.  (exchange of access to opportunity)

In the age of social media, mentors and sponsors are more available than ever.  You can ping your network for instant recommendations to provide wisdom or guidance (mentor) which may be a personal contact, book, blog, etc. Instantaneously you have access to the wisdom of the world, crowd sourced and verified via social media. How cool is that?!?

Similarly, you have access to opportunities that were much more difficult to come by only a few years ago.  Online, you can find and connect with people who will act as a sponsor for you and open doors or make
introductions.  You can “meet” the most amazing people in the world via digital venues such as social media, blogs, webcasts and more.  Later you may have the opportunity to meet in person and form a long term connection, even returning the favor to others over time.

But you can’t take advantage of this wonderful world dynamic of social media sponsors and mentors if you don’t engage and continue to participate on a regular basis.  Your possible sponsors are either online today, or are looking to be.  Take this recent article in AdAge about research done by IBM on the changing needs of CMOs and their struggle to adapt to the changing digital landscape.  If you read through it you’ll see a few things.  One, that if you are skilled in social media you have the opportunity to mentor-up in your company or another organization.  Two, in return for mentoring-up in this topic it is totally fair game to ask for sponsorship from the executive.  Most executives are happy to return a favor when it has broader benefit of some type. So why not ask?

My day job is digital marketing with a decidedly channel pivot (versus end customer), but that does not mean I cannot learn a lot from companies who are amazing at consumer marketing. A community is a community after all, especially in the digital era so learnings from B2B and B2C are highly transferable. One company that is truly great at marketing innovation, and has been for decades, is Coca-Cola.

 Digital marketing and social media in particular have a natural gravitas for food and beverage companies. After all, sharing a Coke with a friend is one of life’s great social pleasures. Coca-Cola products are guests at most social functions in some capacity, so presence in the social media space is more than natural, it is absolutely required for Coca-Cola to get right. With a brand like Coca-Cola you simply cannot afford to be the “social” outcast.

 Wendy Clark, Senior VP of Integrated Marketing Communications and Capabilities at the Coca-Cola Company recently spoke at the AdAge Digital Conference about marketing innovation in the digital era. While you would expect someone with a job title like Ms. Clark to have lots of snazzy catch phrases, you might not expect them to be so universally relevant. Coca-Cola is a large, older company with an enviable market position in numerous products after all. But even with all the marketing budget and brand horsepower that the Coca-Cola Company brings, Ms. Clark gave an inspiring and enlightening presentation.

 The overarching theme of Ms. Clark’s presentation was… be gracious.

Yes, that’s right – be gracious. Being gracious with your communities, customers, indeed all your marketing activities has paid off substantially for the Coca-Cola family of products. Their internal research shows that as soon as they start to push in a community (translation, not being so gracious) the community backlashes either in small waves or large ones.

 This quote from Ms. Clark sums up why being gracious is so important:

 “The days of controlling the message are absolutely over.  At best you’ll be invited in and you’ll get to co-create and participate with consumers.”

 She went on to explain that marketing is “liquid and linked” in ways never before. Liquid because “everything communicates” as Ms. Clark says. And she is right – vending machines, trucks, even the cans themselves communicate to the consumer possibly long before they see one of your artistic print ads, or hear your new jingle on TV.

 My favorite part of her presentation was talking about creating an emotional experience connection with customers via art images on the Coca-Cola cans. Basically she turned a fixed cost of operations (producing the cans) into a marketing asset. She explains that Coca-Cola has to make the cans anyway, so why not have them communicate as well! Everything communicates in the same gracious way. And that is the linked component. All your marketing, messages, community engagement must be linked back to your core brand strategy.

 Why is linkage so important? Well here are some more interesting stats from Coca-Cola. On YouTube, there are 146 million pieces of content for Coca-Cola, but only 26 million, or 18% of the content was actually created by Coca-Cola. Their fans created their own content on top of the company-generated ideas, shared their content with their networks and extended Coca-Cola’s brand reach far beyond what the company could do alone. It is rather amazing when you think about it. 82% of Coca-Cola’s YouTube content was generated by their fans so this fan-generated content by definition resonates with the unique cultures of the various fan communities of Coca-Cola products. That’s right, it resonates with various cultures – allowing the Coca-Cola brands to be gracious yet again.

 Building great and gracious marketing in this liquid and linked world requires a new framework to think about digital marketing. I liked Ms. Clark’s spin on how to use the widely accepted Paid-Owned-Shared-Earned digital media model that most of us use each day. She’s put an action spin on it like this:

 Innovate Paid

Activate Owned

Integrate Shared

Engage Earned

Include storytelling content across all your media.

 To net it all out… Be gracious and celebrate the community in this very liquid and linked world. It’s a new age of marketing and Coca-Cola certainly is a leader. If you need some inspiration, watch the video of Wendy Clark’s AdAge keynote – the talk track is wonderful. And with that, I think it’s time for a Coke and a smile :-)