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As you’ve probably already seen, Nestlé is currently the target of Greenpeace’s campaign Nestlé Killer – Ask Nestlé to give rainforests a break. Along with a video with great viral potential, Greenpeace explains on their website that:
“Nestlé, maker of Kit Kat, uses palm oil from companies that are trashing Indonesian rainforests, threatening the livelihoods of local people and pushing orang-utans towards extinction.
We all deserve to have a break – but having one shouldn’t involve taking a bite out of Indonesia’s precious rainforests. We’re asking Nestlé to give rainforests and orang-utans a break and stop buying palm oil from destroyed forests.”
As it turns out Nestlé shows a perfect example on the worst way you can handle a social media crisis. Of course they did what every text book (or blog) tells you to do when handling a social media crisis: they used their own blog to post information about the case.
Nestlé defends themselves and tell the public that they don’t buy their palm oil from destroyed forests. So far so good.
Then the riot starts on Facebook. Nestlé’s Facebook fan page has been overrun by critics of sustainability issues around palm olive and deforestation. But Nestlé’s response to the crisis has not been to limit or mitigate the damage, but possibly to make things worse.
Several angry Facebook users have posted their intentions to boycott Nestlé products and many have changed their profiles pictures to baby orangutans and a cleverly altered “Killer” KitKat logo. Unfortunately the replies to the critisism have included sarcastic, irritable and downright rude responses to some of the messages from a Nestlé employee who has clearly cracked under pressure.
It’s great that Nestlé acknowledges that they’re in the middle of a serious crisis and it’s great that they use their own website to update people on the matter. If they didn’t do what Greenpeace accuse them of, they should of course defend themselves. But if the accusations are true, they need to fess up, make some changes and apologise. The decision to reply to people’s critical comments on Facebook is also fine – but the content of these replies is catastrophic.
It seems as if Nestlé doesn’t realise that Facebook users and fans of their Facebook page are actually not only potential customers and stakeholders. They are also communicators on one of the world’s largest networks, and their opinions matter.
I have no idea how Nestlé is going to save this one, but I sincerely hope they work out a social media crisis plan for next time a crisis occurs and give their community manager some proper training on how to interact with opinionated users and lead a community.
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