Coca-Cola has developed a highly successful social networking strategy over the past two years. The company currently owns the second most popular page on Facebook with 3,261,218 members, and has a strong presence on other social sites, including YouTube and Second Life, as well as its own corporate blog.

Michael Donnelly, the company's global interactive marketing director, said at the Social Networking World Forum in London this week that the success of the strategy was the result of breaking from traditional marketing strategies and letting customers lead the way. "So we let consumers drive the strategy, which we then embrace," he explained.

At first the idea of using social networks for marketing purposes had made Coca-Cola "a little uncomfortable", as traditional marketing had always worked well for the company. Donnelly cited the 1.5 billion servings of Coke sold every day as evidence.

"So we started by collecting, learning, analysing and scaling what was going on in the world in social networks as well as in Coca-Cola. We interviewed [people in] 23 countries on the topic, and collected 60 Coke and 150 competitor case studies," he said.

An additional obstacle had been the global integration necessary for a social media strategy. Donnelly explained that his role had been to "scale the learning from all around the world".

"We had brilliant marketers all over the world but they were decentralised in each country and, while they each had a social network, they were not sharing their experiences," he said.

The deployment of the social media strategy began in late 2007 with the launch of Coca-Cola Conversations, the first of the company's corporate blogs, which discusses Coca-Cola's role in popular culture, its brand history and collectables.

Coca-Cola infiltrated the virtual world space in the same year by launching a competition for residents of Second Life called Virtual Thirst to design a vending machine that dispensed the essence of Coca-Cola rather than the drink itself.

"When Second Life came out, everyone fell back into the trap of traditional marketing, and they all tried to create their own avatars. So ours was an attempt to do something different," said Donnelly.

The company has also gone after the YouTube audience, launching a video exclusively for users of the site called Mean Joe Greene - The Making of the Commercial. The video explains how the famous Coke commercial was made.