Nestle have been bombarded with angry consumers on Twitter andFacebook with critical comments. Consumers have accused the company of ‘hiding behind PR spin', calling the company's response to the criticism a ‘major social media fail'. (PRWeek) Digital PR experts said the situation was quickly becoming a social media crisis.
Porter Novelli associate director, digital, Kerry Gaffney said: ‘Nestle's status updates are pushing people on to its official site to see its corporate response. Someone within Nestle is also responding to posts, but they are not corporate in tone and are juvenile. The company should be tailoring its response more to the environment with a more human tone.'
One of the things Nestle did wrong was to use a junior position to respond to the comments, but they should have used a more experienced senior position to deal with the online attacks.
Nestley thought they could get YouTube to close down the video and ignore the situation, which made it even worse, it was like throwing gasoline into a fire. The story blow even bigger! One user commented on Vimeo: "Thank you Nestle...I would never have seen this video if you hadn`t had it kicked off YouTube. Now I`m forwarding it all my friends, through Facebook, and guess what they are forwarding it all their mates. Fire your PR team. They are muppets."
Facebook has been hit worse, people was leaving critical comments on Nestle’s fan page, some criticising the company’s social media approach. For example, "social media is about embracing your market, engaging and having a conversation rather than preaching!" Which then resulted in more hostility from Nestle as they started to delete some of the comments.
After deleting, Nestley started to respond with juvenile statements like: "Thanks for the lesson in manners. Consider yourself embraced. But it's our page, we set the rules, it was ever thus."
This situation is a perfect theory example for a phenomenon called the Streisand effect. If Nestle reacted differently to the situation it might not have become a crisis for them. Use PR right: Don’t insult your customers. And in PR 2010, mind your behaviour in social media platforms — especially those particularly created for the fans of your company. Some say It may there is no such thing as bad press, but think twice when it comes to social media. Nestle is a perfect example.
What Nestle could/should have done:
1) When the video came out, respond where the attacks were happening and respond with the same technique.
2) Greenpeace have freedom of speech to spread their version, you spread yours. Never try do delete the content, as people will feel you are taking away their rights of free speech. After all, Nestle have good blogger relationships, they should have used that.
3) Point out that you are trying to make things better, but these things take time. In the meantime all suggestions welcome.
The way Nestle handled things Greenpeace achieved what they wanted with their campaign. Will this result in people stop buying Nestle products? Now on Facebook people are talking about boycotting Nestle products during Easter. The situation has resulted in revenue loss for Nestle; it will take them time to convince their consumers to buy products again.
This whole mess draws attention to what I think is one of the most important aspects of social media, which is the social media crisis plan. Clearly, Nestle had no such plan ready.
Non-governmental organizations (NGO) need healthy relationships with the public to meet their goals. Foundations and charities use sophisticated public relations campaigns to raise funds and employ standard lobbying techniques with governments. A speaker from Friends of the Earth said that their NGO organisation would do anything to separate what they do from anything related to public relations. However, at the end of the day, what all NGOs do is PR!
He said another interesting thing, that NGO is "a brand destroyer". According to this man NGO run campaigns in order to destroy or threaten reputation of big companies. It all comes back to the first statement, how can NGO achieve all that with out techniques used in PR?
A good example of the statement is when Greenpeace ran a campaign against Dove. Greenpeace's forests campaigners were invited to meet with senior executives at Unilever headquarters on Friday 9 May 2008. In just two weeks Unilever had received tens of thousands of protest emails from around the world, because Greenpeace activists brought masses of news media to their buildings in the UK, Netherlands and Italy. Greenpeace achieved that by launching a viral video online called "Dove Onslaught(er)". Public pressure moved Unilever to react.
This was the first success in a broader campaign to secure real change on the ground in South East Asia. The campaign was designed to stop the palm oil industry from destroying the Paradise Forests, and ensuring the protection of the climate and a future for orang-utans. On the Greenpeace website they state: “If others in the palm oil industry are smart, they'll follow Unilever's lead. There's no excuse for wasting time now, so any industry slow-learners could be our next campaign target”.
15th March 2010, Greenpeace kept their word. They launched a viral video “Kit Kat – give the orang-utan a break”.
Greenpeace state they have new evidence which shows that Nestlé - the makers of Kit Kat - are using palm oil produced in areas where the orang-utans' rainforests once grew. Even worse, the company doesn't seem to care. This has now resulted in Nestlé has struggled to contain a bombardment of criticism from angry consumers on Twitter and its official Facebook page.
On Twitter, the firm has been bombarded with critical comments. Consumers have also turned to Facebook and accused the company of ‘hiding behind PR spin', calling the company's response to the criticism a ‘major social media fail'. (PRWeek)
Digital PR experts said the situation was quickly becoming a social media crisis.
NGO might be fighting for a better cause using PR, but I believe the way they do it is harming the overall PR reputation.
http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/blog/forests/kit-kat-give-orang-utan-break-20100317
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/campaigns/forests/asia-pacific/dove-palmoil-action
PRWeek - Facebook Crises
For many years PR has been fighting to be credible, by using new media it is easy for everyone to access and post information, which means in order for the information to be credible the readers need to spend more time on researching in order to be reinsured that the information is reliable. In the book "Flat Earth News" Davis is talking about how naive the readers are when reading a newspaper, which most readers believe to be credible news, but how can they know better when the journalist many times run a story with out themselves knowing how credible the information is.
Will blogging be a positive or negative tool for PR? At this particular time during recession, blogs are here to financially support the communication channels. Everything mentioned in this report suggest that there is more pros for the social media and blogs, however as everything else, it has its own downsides.
After talking about social media, it sounds like traditional media is no longer relevant. It is not true, media is critically important for many organisations. A positive story in the Guardian or an article in the Financial Times will still bring more publicity to any company than any web-blog. Blogs as a trend is here to stay and there is much that the PR industry can achieve by using social media and its channel of communication. Blogging may change the nature of PR as an industry and it could perhaps take it to a new way of building relations with the public, a way that is not only direct and honest but one that includes responsibility. What will happen with social media and PR in the future? Social media era is here and PR needs to adapt and follow its trends.
Posts
All Comments
