I will be posting a more thorough review of the situation soon, but for now take a glance at Nestlé’s facebook page. The firestorm originates from this information from environmental activist organization, Greenpeace.
In short, Nestlé is accused of buying Palm Oil for use in it’s confectionary products in Indonesia from companies involved in heavy deforestation, deforestation that is threatening the native endangered orang-utan population. Nestlé is making statements blaming the infrastructure of the purchase chain for a lack of accountability and implementing a plan to be sustainable in that country in five years. As always, the truth does not matter, only the reality. That reality is that public opinion of, as Fortune puts it, the World’s most admired consumer food company, has taken a big hit because of these serious accusations.
The problem is that the primary battlefield has been the company’s official facebook page, linked above, and Nestlé is treating the situation as a PR disaster, not as a social disaster. As a result, through deleting comments and posting lengthy PR articles, they have managed to further alienate themselves from the customers reaching out to them on Facebook.
In the study of interaction on social networking sites it is clear that people seek out and attack injustices through social networks only when they care about the response. These tens of thousands of negative comments revolve around a central theme: “What are you going to do about it, Nestlé?” Nestlé is responding in the way most corporations do: making a plan to fix it as soon as it is financially beneficial/feasible. The problem is that social media has changed the game, people want results, not commitments to future results. Nestlé made a big blunder with the way they treated this crisis, which simply further illustrates the point that neither a PR person, a marketing/advertising person, an operations guru, a technophile, nor a sales person is adequate to run a social networking presence. When crises arise, you must be able to tackle it from the perspective of the users or you stand to lose more than social media could ever gain you.
