The creative and strategic thinkers at the soft drinks giant have since shown laudable innovation, from the “Happiness Factory” concept featuring the work of up and coming animators and bands onwards. Two recent examples from the UK that display Coca-Cola’s understanding of effective use of branded content, social networking and the harnessing of traditional and digital media in tandem are the Cactus Kid campaign for Oasis and the launch of the mobile portal the Silver Room for Diet Coke.

The Cactus Kid storyline culminated in asking viewers of the TV ads to vote online for the ending they preferred for the fugitive Oasis drinker, his girlfriend and new-born baby.

The final voting tally was 9,303 – not a huge amount – but the campaign also chalked up 2,123 friends for Cactus Girl on her MySpace page and 100,000 YouTube views. Not too shabby.

The Diet Coke Silver Room sees the brand leave behind its inconsistent TV strategy of recent years, from deploying Caprice and movie-style glamour to Tort the Tortoise and back to the Diet Coke hunk, to embrace the online mobile world and the young, technologically aware, female audience

But while the online world can distribute a message to millions and engage, it can also provide an unforgiving platform for damaging commentary. A high profile example came in last Saturday’s Guardian Weekend supplement with a piece by comedian turned agitator Mark Thomas entitled “To Die For” and one can wager that the article’s substance is likely to spark an ever widening online debate.

The piece dealt with the alleged complicity between Coca-Cola and its Columbian bottlers in union-busting and assassinations and trailed Thomas’s book Belching Out The Devil: Global Adventures With Coca-Cola. Thomas’s allegations also had an airing on Channel 4 last year. As the average net circulation for The Guardian’s print publication in August was more than 332,000 this puts the Oasis online voting figure somewhat in the shade.

The coverage will shift online where a myriad links and forums will once again discuss the Coca-Cola brand in relation to some appalling abuses. Putting in “Coca-Cola and Columbia” into Google, as this article is written, sees a campaigning website as the second result listed.

PR teams and communications advisors have long grappled with how to manage a brand’s reputation online and the standard advice is to join in the conversation, not control it. It will be interesting to see how Coca-Cola addresses the latest round of negative coverage in the digital sphere.