As you probably do not know, Greenpeace has launched a campaign against Nestlé, and its use of "non sustainable" palm oil.
The position of Greenpeace is that Nestlé’s decision to only gradually switch to "sustainable" palm oil is unacceptable since it will cause irreparable damage to the rain forest and to the orangutans that inhabit it. The position of Nestlé is that it would not be realistic to commit to 100% sustainable palm oil before 2015 because demand of "sustainable" palm oil outstrips supply.
I am sure that it would take a very substantial amount of queries on Google to find out who is "right" and who is "wrong".
As you probably do not know, Greenpeace has launched a campaign against Nestlé, and its use of "non sustainable" palm oil.
The position of Greenpeace is that Nestlé’s decision to only gradually switch to "sustainable" palm oil is unacceptable since it will cause irreparable damage to the rain forest and to the orangutans that inhabit it. The position of Nestlé is that it would not be realistic to commit to 100% sustainable palm oil before 2015 because demand of "sustainable" palm oil outstrips supply.
I am sure that it would take a very substantial amount of queries on Google to find out who is "right" and who is "wrong".
In any case, the campaign was started four days ago with a video that mocked Nestlé’s Kit Kat ad, posted by Greenpeace on Youtube.
Nestlé asked Youtube to remove the video for copyright infringement.
Greenpeace responded by reposting the video on Vimeo, where it has been viewed about 230k times. The daily peak was attained the 18th, with 90k views. This number fell to 30k the 20th and to 15k the 21st. The "storm" seems – at least on Vimeo – to have lost part of its steam.
The pull-down triggered a first wave of protests against Nestlé that was accused of not having respected the "social media" etiquette. Two videos ridiculing Nesté’s move were posted on Youtube but did not get more that a couple of thousand views.
In my opinion, whether the fact of pulling the video from video was a mistake or not is anybody’s judgement.
What is funny is that the debate "moved" from the core issue of the "right" or "wrong" use of palm oil to the – much less relevant, but apparently more interesting – issue of "how can Nestlé be so stupid as to fiddle with Social Media" a pull a video down. Is everybody sure that Social Media is that important for the customer?
My personal belief is that if consumers will get pissed off with Nestlé it will be because the buy into the idea that Nestlé is (allegedly) using non sustainable palm oil, not because it was "so arrogant" as to pull down a (pretty crude, and from Nestlé’s point of view not funny at all) video.
Then it got worst: the "Nestlé social media failure" story moved to Facebook, where Nestlé has a fan page with about 90k fans. Kit Kat pages have many more fans, but were relatively spared by this "web storm".
Anyway, bloggers announced the "social media meltdown", the "historical PR disaster", and the possible "destruction of the company", because of this failure of managing Facebook.
Intrigued, I tried to analyse the comments on the page, and see for myself where was the failure. This is my take.
There are a large number of comments that are indeed very critical towards Nestlé. As a matter of fact, most seemed a tad too critical to me, repeating – as a fact – the non-new (but personally unconvincing) accusation that Nestlé directly contributes to infant mortality by selling its powder milk in developing countries.
These "non-fans" certainly did not start hating Nestlé because they saw the mock ad by Greenpeace on Vimeo yesterday morning.
In my opinion the fact that the comments were so extreme and "corporate bashing" ended up reducing their "virality" towards people (like myself) that are concerned about the environment, would hate to see orangutans loose their land, but tend to mistrust stories painted in too vivid colors.
However these comments were not the reason why blog posts and #Nestle tweets considered Nestlé story on Facebook such a disaster as to make Nestlé stock fall by more than 1% (one would be tempted to explain the difference between coincidence and causality, but it doesn’t matter).
The reason was that the page "moderator" had not "behaved well" and had "offended" the fans by asking them not to post comments on the page using, as an image, a modified logo of Nestlé or of Kit Kat. Apparently that is something that a brand on Facebook is really really not supposed to say, oh no no no.
Nestlé’s page moderator even excused him/herself and did not remove any negative comment (with or without the modified Nestlé logo).
But – apparently – the (irreparable) damage was done.
Really?
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