The Coke side of virtual life

Earlier this week, Coca-Cola announced the launch of its Virtual Thirst campaign (details here.)  It's the soft drink giant's first foray into Second Life and my initial thought was, "just what avatars need, bubbly black water."  So imagine my dismay when I discovered that Coke, with the help of new marketing agency crayon and world builder Millions of Us, actually got it right.

Yesterday morning, I spend some time in-world chatting with Steve Coulson (SL: Gideon Television), crayon's chief creative office, about the project.

Virtual Thirst isn't really a Second Life implementation -- it's a robust social media program deployed across multiple established and emergent community sites, and marketed through well orchestrated buzz tactics.  And it's not really about cans of soda -- it's about the "essence of Coca-Cola" (the competition invites consumers to submit ideas for virtual machines that vend experiences that speak to the Coke's brand attributes of refreshment, joy and unity rather than just Coke products.)

Sure, the campaign leverages the creative bent of Second Life's resident community, uses some of crayon's in-world real estate as a showplace for prototype vending machines and will ultimately provide the distribution platform for the winning creation (which will be brought to virtual life in conjunction with Millions of Us).  But the important thing about this program is that it uses Second Life as just one piece of an integrated, cross-platform social media strategy.  Virtual Thirst spans not only SL but also MySpace, YouTube, Flickr and del.icio.us -- not to mention a robust blogger outreach program (Coulson reached out and invited me to chat, even knowing that I tend to crap all over brand efforts in SL), ongoing buzz tracking and a concerted effort by the Coca-Cola Company to join in the ongoing social media conversations.

In fact, in a ballsy move, Coke hasn't done a mainstream media push for this program.  They're not advertising it, their announcement hit the web as a "social media release" rather than the wire as a traditional release and they seem to be focused on building organic viral buzz rather than on getting splashy headlines from big media.

Given that so much of the big brand activity around Second Life has been all splash and little substance, I find Coke's take on Second Life and converged social media, erm, refreshing.  At the end of the day, will this program sell more Coke?  No idea, but as a social marketing platform it looks pretty smart. 

Dammit, I hate it when I have to say nice things about Jaffe. :-)

[Jiggy chatting with Gideon Television and Divo Dapto - real world crayonistas Steve Coulson and Joseph Jaffe, the brains and looks behind Virtual Thirst.]