Facebook is making the world more open and connected, empowering people to connect with brands in ways never before imagined. Never before have the relationships between individuals and brands been this accessible. Today, people have the opportunity to have a public dialog with brands on Facebook, with the entire world watching.

Consumers have shaped Coca-Cola for the past 125 years. Even the abbreviation ‘Coke’ derived from people using the nickname instead of the full trademark. Ironically, Coca-Cola is one of few brands whose consumers haven’t given it the license to change. In 1985, when Coca-Cola changed the formula, launching ‘New Coke’, consumer uprising forced the return of original Coca-Cola in only 79 days. Before the change, Coca-Cola was getting 400 calls a day on its hotline, after it got 1,500 per day protesting the change. Today, Coca-Cola receives nearly 1,700 comments a day on our Facebook Page.In 2011, Facebook revealed a new timeline format for Facebook Profiles. Since the first indication that Facebook Pages would receive a similar redesign, industry pundits quickly speculated how Coca-Cola would tell their brand history. How could we tell this story in a way that celebrated user-generated content from the past 125 years?

We wanted to tell the history of Coca-Cola through the stories of our consumers who have helped shaped the brand, as opposed to just telling the chronology of the brand in the company’s words. Rather than using analytics to optimise our messages, we curated the stories that others have shared with us about their lives, picking the ones that best represented the brand story.

* Without the use of paid media, 14MM fans, 1/3 of the entire Coca-Cola Facebook community, saw our timeline posts on the day Timeline was released. Facebook claims the average post is only seen by 16% of a page’s audience. Our views were 122% above daily reach of the page, showing that fans were not only seeing the content, but sharing it. * 224,735 people engaged with the Coke Timeline at launch, a 63% increase over the previous average daily engagement* Upon launch, organic daily reach increased by 436% and page views nearly doubledThe new Coca-Cola timeline page was mentioned in over 60 industry and general news articles, reaching more than 22m readers in the first 3 weeks after launch. An example: “Coca-Cola, for instance, is leveraging 125 years of history through the lens of fans’ letters to the Company over the years, including one from a man who asked for the exclusive franchise on the moon when President Kennedy pledged in 1961 to put a man there. As the brand mused in a blog post today, "What did Coke fans do before Facebook?"” - brandchannel.com Feb 29th, 2012This 125-year-old story is just beginning.