Nestle’s crash course in social media
While some companies are managing to use social media to their advantage, building their brand, connecting with customers, others are struggling. And Nestle is is in the latter camp, having received a crash course in how to use social media over the past couple of days.
Many people don’t like Nestle, accusing the company of contributing to deforestation, climate change, and endangering orangutans by its continued use of palm oil. Unsurprisingly, Greenpeace is rallying against the company, and, according to CNET, encouraged supporters to post to Nestle’s Facebook page en masse with criticisms and the company’s logo (pictured above) altered to denigrate the brand.
The moderator of the Facebook page didn’t take kindly to this, and warned, “We welcome your comments, but please don’t post using an altered version of any of our logos as your profile pic–they will be deleted,” before responding to one reply to this by saying, “Thanks for the lesson in manners. Consider yourself embraced. But it’s our page, we set the rules, it was ever thus.”
The comments then took a decidedly nastier turn as people didn’t like the way Nestle was treating them. The argument then moved to Twitter. And one look at Nestle’s Facebook page now shows quite what an effect this has had on the visitors and comments.
I’m guessing that the moderator will no longer be in a job come Monday morning. And that Nestle will be embarking on something of a PR effort. It certainly needs to do something.
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March 21st, 2010
This is actually just the latest in a long series of PR disasters Nestlé has suffered, most brought on itself, both offline and online.
Last year it suffered a PR disaster on twitter in the build up to International Nestle-Free Week over its pushing of baby milks. Nestlé attempted to co-opt US parenting bloggers to relay its messages from a 5-star hotel in California. But people raised concerns on the #nestlefamily hashtag Nestlé set up and some of the bloggers offered to take questions to put to Nestlé executives. Nestlé mishandled the whole operation.
In February it was revealed by PR Week that it is recruiting a PR company to improve its image in cyber space and it was also reported that it is paying celebrities US$10,000 per tweet to say nice things about it on Twitter. None of this is likely to work, of course; Nestlé needs to change its management practices not its PR.
See:
http://boycottnestle.blogspot.com/2010/02/nestle-launches-cyberwar.html