The Coca-Cola Company has always been one of my favorite companies, in part because of its innovative marketing. With the incredible brand recognition Coke enjoys it would be easy to get complacent, but Coca-Cola executives have resisted the temptation to do so.

So it’s no surprise that Atlanta-based Coca-Cola has become a leader in social media marketing. With 500 brands in more than 200 countries, can’t afford not to be efficient.

Michael Donnelly, the company’s group director of worldwide interactive marketing, oversees a group of 30 people in Coke’s global interactive group, including four focused on social media, according to an article last month Media Post News Marketing Daily

A new program called KO Social Hub reportedly will be a social media tool kit that any of Coca-Cola’s 3,500 marketers around the world can use locally to create programs.

“The idea,” Marketing Daily states, “is to make it easier for marketers in different countries to reach local cohorts of Coca-Cola’s 7 million fans across dozens of social-media sites.”

Instead of running programs, Mr. Donnelly is providing marketers with platforms to potentially run thousands of programs.

“If you were to create a Facebook and YouTube page for every country in which you market, then moderate and run those pages, you will be doing a $30 to $40 million investment,” he notes. “Our strategy is to have a single presence, central pages so that no matter where you are in the world, when you pull up YouTube/Coca-Cola, you get a country-local social page.”

Sounds like a smart, cost-effective strategy that will pay great dividends by continuing to build Coke’s brands throughout the world.

Don Beehler provides public relations consulting services to small- and medium-sized advertising agencies and businesses.