Why Nestlé deserves some real fans

The confectionery giant got done over by the crowd when it offended social media etiquette, but credit it with taking one for the corporate world, David Bowen says.

Featured sites

Online managers in large organisations should buy the web people at Nestlé a drink. They have done some real life testing of reputation management by social media, and have sustained a bit of a beating in the process. They discovered the hard way, so with any luck you won’t have to.

You may know the story, in which case skip to my comments (it got a huge amount of coverage, which is itself a story). But for those who don’t, here is a summary.

A world gone ape

The ordeal started in mid-March, when Greenpeace launched a video on YouTube attacking Nestlé’s use of Indonesian palm oil. The film showed an office worker breaking open his KitKat chocolate bar, and pulling out and eating an orang-utan’s finger. The message was not subtle: Nestlé buys palm oil from an area where the apes live, threatening their environment.

Nestlé demanded that YouTube take the video down, because it infringed the confectioner’s intellectual property (IP) rights. YouTube did. Nestlé’s Facebook page quickly filled up with posts from ‘fans’ who were anything but. Quite a few used as their Facebook picture a doctored version of a KitKat wrapper, with the name replaced by ‘Killer’ and a line saying ‘To find out why, visit greenpeace.org/kitkat’.

The anonymous Nestlé Facebook administrator then posted a message saying ‘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’.

There followed a conversation between a Facebook user call Paul Griffin and the Nestlé administrator. Here’s an edited snippet:

PG Hmm, this comment is a bit ‘Big Brotherish’, isn’t it? I’ll have whatever I want as my logo pic thanks! And if it’s altered it’s no longer your logo, is it!

Nestlé That’s a new understanding of intellectual property rights. We’ll muse on that. You can have what you like as your profile picture. But if it’s an altered version of any of our logos, we’ll remove it from this page.

PG Not sure you’re going to win friends in the social media space with this sort of dogmatic approach… Social Media is about embracing your market, engaging and having a conversation rather than preaching! Read www.cluetrain.com and rethink!

Nestlé Thanks for the lesson in manners. Consider yourself embraced. But it’s our page, we set the rules, it was ever thus.

This triggered a deluge of posts. The palm oil issue was almost forgotten for a while as ‘fans’ piled in to demand how Nestlé’s spokesperson dare talk like this. For example:

“Hey PR moron. Thanks you are doing a far better job than we could ever achieve in destroying your brand.”

“It’s not OK for people to use altered versions of your logos, but it’s OK for you to alter the face of Indonesian rainforests?”

A few people tried to stand up for Nestlé, on the grounds that it was reasonable that it should want to protect its IP. They got a verbal thumping.

Nestlé then changed tack. The information panel under its logo read ‘Social media: As you can see, we’re learning as we go’. And the administrator donned a hair shirt: “This (deleting logos) was one a series of mistakes for which I apologise. And for being rude. We have stopped deleting posts, and I have stopped being rude”.
As a side note, shortly after the video went up the company posted a Q&A covering the palm oil issue on its media home page, and used Twitter and Facebook to point to it.

Six lessons hidden in the hubbub

This has already become case study in how not to use social media. I think the lessons are a bit more interesting than that.

1. Greenpeace is a formidable online operator that we should all study. When the Guardian newspaper asked if it had orchestrated the Facebook campaign, a Greenpeace spokesman said: “We don’t have the resources to hire a social media agency. Nestlé brought this outrage on themselves”. Um, well. If you remember the Brent Spar campaign in the mid-1990s, you will know that Greenpeace ran rings around Shell with its online campaign, and it’s doing the same with Nestlé. Look at its website, its YouTube channel, its Flickr page and, of course, its Facebook page. You will see integrated use of social media and web that no corporate I know matches. Why would it hire a social media agency? It doesn’t need to.

2. Nestlé was never going to win. It is a corporate hate figure for many people, thanks largely to the long-running baby milk controversy. But it made things worse with an early mistake: demanding the KitKat YouTube video be taken down. This was daft for three reasons. It did not get rid of the video (put ‘greenpeace kitkat’ into Google in the UK, and Greenpeace has sponsored a link to point you to it). It gave the video free publicity. And it played into the ‘big bully Nestlé’ image. Had Nestlé really got its act together, it may even have considered putting the Greenpeace video on its own site, along with a suitable response. That could have worked.

3. The group did do well in one way – it reacted fast. When something like this happens, the target has a maximum of 48 hours to react before the situation is completely out of its control. Nestlé got a Q&A page up fast on its site – I think on the same day – and promoted it. And it plunged immediately into battle on Facebook.

4. What is really remarkable is that Nestlé was prepared to use Facebook actively. It may or may not have been the right thing to do, but I’m amazed that it happened at all. Putting these last two points together, it is clear that Nestlé does have an online reputation management strategy of sorts. This makes it a rare beast.

5. A company may think that it owns its Facebook page, but it does not. Nestlé was treating its Facebook page like a normal piece of company territory, where it could set the rules – don’t shout in our offices, that sort of thing. But there is still a strong belief, coming from the early days of the internet, that the online world does not belong to anyone, and most certainly not to giant corporations. Even before the web, bulletin boards like The Well kept the hippy culture going and when I started in this world in the early 1990s, there was widespread resentment that companies were there at all. There wasn’t much anyone could do about them when they had their own web pages but, with social media, there certainly is. Whether we like it or not, businesses use social media subject to the tolerance of ‘the community’.

6. It (‘the community’) is not tolerant. The reaction to the Nestlé’s administrator’s comments, and to those who defended them, was that of an angry crowd. I enjoyed his or her use of language – “consider yourself embraced” is wonderful – but apart from a few disinterested commentators, no one else did. The great majority of people posting were outraged, so using interesting language is not going to have the slightest effect.

What Nestlé should have done differently

It should have had a policy that one team – the online team – controls decisions such as the suppression of the YouTube video. I would be surprised if the team took this decision, because no one who understood the web would do that.

It should have immediately had a meeting to decided a strategy, and got it moving – no time to talk to a social media agency.

It should have abandoned its Facebook page as soon as it was clear it had lost control of it. Its opponents would have run out of steam more quickly had there been no one to oppose.

It should now consider whether it needs a Facebook page at all. If it doesn’t really own it, what’s the point of having it?

First published on 07 April, 2010