Coke set to fizz with social networking site

Facebook, MySpace and Coca-Cola? That seems to be want marketers at Coke want as today the soda conglomerate  said it would  launch its own mobile phone-based social networking community called Sprite Yard later this month. MySpace, the largest  social networking site, is available on some phones. However, its 67 million monthly unique visitors in the US mostly access the site on computers, with phone access hampered by the small screens of most mobile handsets, Reuters said in a report. Coke said it hopes to overcome this by tailoring the format of the service to be used more easily on mobile phones and by offering free content. Accessing the Sprite Yard is easy and simple. Anyone with a WAP enabled phone and access to a data plan can join the Yard. Beginning June 22, U.S. consumers can text “YARD” to 59666 (“Lymon”) and receive a reply with a WAP link to access the Sprite Yard for the fist time. Clicking the link directs the mobile device to the Yard where they are invited to register by selecting a tag name and password. As soon as they are registered, users can opt to create a profile to share information about themselves with their friends in the Yard, the company said in a release.A New York Tomes article says one main challenge will be for Sprite Yard to become a media destination in its own right. Advertisers generally leave it to media companies to create content, because capturing an audience is not easy. BudTV, a Web site with original content that the Anheuser-Busch Companies introduced in February, is viewed as a cautionary example, with lagging Web traffic. Advertising executives said that Coca-Cola could have a hard time creating a popular site even in the new mobile world. Facebook, for example, will be a competitor with a mobile version of its site. Who wants to hang out with Sprite? One person asks. Other says the venture is like Anheuser-Busch’s Bud.TV, which has struggled to establish itself as a destination site.   Certainly the mobile advertising market is one Coke wants to grab a slice of. The Yankee Group has forecast the mobile advertising market to more than quadruple to $275 million in 2007 and eventually increase to $2.2 billion in 2010, up from an estimated $60 million in 2006. And while Sprite trails Coca-Cola in popularity, the company chose this brand for its mobile venture because of its appeal to teenagers, it said. It said it may expand the service to other brands as well as create related desktop internet sites.Companies in the network technology arena are also interested in cashing in. Cisco, the biggest vendor in the IP network world recently  acquired Five Across, a social-networking software company in San Francisco. Cisco doesn’t necessarily plan to set up its own social-networking site to compete against News Corp.’s MySpace or Facebook. Instead, it will use Five Across technology to create software that will help companies better connect with their customers. In addition, service providers may be able to build services with the technology and sell them to their business customers, Cisco said.  Five Across sells a software platform called Connect Community Builder. It includes a variety of features that enterprises can build into their Web presence for their customers, such as individual profile pages, friend lists, discussions, and posting of blogs, videos and podcasts. The company, founded in 2003, has just 11 employees, according to Cisco. Last year NHL Enterprises L.P.’s National Hockey League launched a site for hockey fans, called NHL Connect, using Five Across software.