Lessons From Nestle’s Facebook Fan Page Revolt

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Last week, Greenpeace launched a campaign against Nestle KitKat procuring palm oil from suppliers who are “destroying the Indonesian rainforests, threatening the livelihoods of local people and pushing orang-utans towards extinction.”

Apart from investigative reports on Nestle’s practices, Greenpeace launched a gory video that shows a Nestle employee eating an orang-utan finger in a KitKat pack –

Nestle tried to get Google to take down the video on YouTube on the grounds of copyright violation, triggering off the Streisand Effect, as the video went viral on Vimeo and several YouTube users re-posted the video on YouTube. Now the original YouTube video is back up.

Even as Nestle made half-hearted noises about switching to sustainable palm oil, Greenpeace launched a full-on social media offensive against Nestle, changing its UK homepage into a Nestle Killer mockup and asking its supporters to protest against Nestle by sharing the video, changing their profile pictures to Nestle Killer, and boycotting Nestle products –

As fans flooded the Nestle’s Facebook Page with negative comments and Nestle Killer profile pics, a Nestle rep picked up a war of words with the fans –

To repeat: 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.

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

You have freedom of speech and expression. Here, there are some rules we set. As in almost any other forum. It’s to keep things clear.

Oh please… it’s like we’re censoring everything to allow only positive comments.

– only to apologize soon afterward –

As you can see we’re learning as we go. Thanks for the comments.

This (deleting logos) was one in a series of mistakes for which I would like to apologize. And for being rude. We’ve stopped deleting posts, and I have stopped being rude.

Now, protesters are asking people to leave the Nestle fan page and join the Boycott Nestle group, which has close to 12000 members –

Make your point, then click bottom left “Remove me from fans” then join Boycott Nestle on Facebook. I’d really prefer to see these fan numbers dropping, at the moment there’s probably a Nestle Executive somewhere thinking it can’t all be bad given we have 95,000 + fans on Facebook! They won’t read the content and won’t take onboard that probably (guess) 94,000 of the 95,000 hate them!

Scott Douglas has created a useful prezi on the timeline of the Nestle crisis –

As the “fan revolt” against Nestle continues on Twitter and Facebook, its useful to look back at the hard lessons Nestle is learning from the debacle –

1. The balance of power is shifting away from big brands like Nestle to anti-corporate activists like Greenpeace, as activists can engage supporters at scale without substantial ad spends, thanks to the viral effect of social platforms like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. We can expect anti-corporate campaigns to become increasingly more controversial and hard-hitting, as activists try to tap into these viral loops. Can we expect brands to become more socially responsible to preempt such backlashes? I am not quite sure, but I sure hope so.

2. Brand representatives will realize that it’s almost impossible to “engage” with an angry mob of protesters. In the case of a rumor, a straight-forward response from a company representative (with a name and a face) might prompt the detractors to be more respectful. In the case of an ideological mob protest, it might only add fuel to the fire. The best approach is to promptly put up a response page on the corporate website, with relevant facts and video comments from senior executives, share it on the important social platforms, and point protesters to it. Lisa Barone has some good advise on when to respond to negative comments and when to stay quiet.

3. Finally, it’s almost always counter-productive to try to take down a video on YouTube or delete comments on a Facebook Page. On the internet, the more you try to control a conversation, the more difficult it becomes to control it. The best approach is to point to facts in a negative conversations and try to balance them out by generating more positive conversations. On a self-hosted fan community, it’s possible and normal to put comments on moderation during a backlash like this, but not on a Facebook Page. Expect brands to demand more robust moderation tools on Facebook Pages and Facebook to provide them.

In the cacophony of PR and social media experts quoting from ‘The Cluetrain Manifesto’ and insisting that Nestle’s social media response is an epic #fail, here are some sane voices.

Andrew Leonard in The Salon (@koxinga21) –

It’s a sad sight, to see a man (or woman) broken by the taunts of an angry mob. But what I find most confounding about this whole sorry display is that the real error here was for the moderator to act like an actual human being. Most corporate public relations is about smoothing all rough edges away with the goal of creating an essentially false version of reality, full of comforting jargon and meaningless buzzwords. Exhibit A: Nestle’s official statement on palm oil. Many of the commentators on this Facebook fracas are saying that Nestle should just have kept reiterating what was in that statement and avoided riling the crowd. But what’s the point of simply pushing regurgitated pap? How can that be considered good manners? It’s managed discourse that means nothing, and I think it’s far more degrading to the chances of real communication between corporations and consumers than the damage done by one person who shows his annoyance at a bunch of people who imagine that they are engaging in some form of meaningful social protest by posting complaints about a company while sporting juvenile profile pictures on a Facebook fan page.

I gotta say I’m kind of loving the nameless gal (or guy) who had the temerity to tell his (or her) critics “Consider yourself embraced.” That was real! That was awesome.

He or she will never make that mistake again, of course, and that just contributes to our greater social detriment. Because if we are going to use social media to its fullest capacity, it should be to help us make real connections between people — not to attack them when they reveal their own humanity.

Caroline McCarthy on CNet (@caro) –

Putting aside all judgment on who’s right and who’s wrong in this situation, we are seeing the dark side of the Facebook fan page: when what was intended to be an open way for fans to show their support was turned into a billboard of outrage on behalf of critics, and with a company representative in obvious panic over how to tame the mob. It’s rare that public opposition will reach a truly uncontrollable level, but when it does, it’s ugly.

But this is the first time that we’ve seen such a massive blow-up in the comments of a Facebook fan page. Right now, the Facebook page is one of the hottest digital marketing tools out there, and brands hearing about the Nestle debacle are also seeing the downsides of operating such a public forum to welcome consumer comments. Whether this will be remembered as a single badly mismanaged user backlash or a pratfall of social-media marketing in general has yet to be seen.

Dennis Howlett at ZDNet (@dahowlett) –

Much is being made of the Nestle PR debacle. All perfectly understandable. References to the bombing of Nestle’s Facebook presence are already being hailed as a social media case study in the making. Again, understandable. But…is it making any difference to Nestle?

Whether Nestle’s actions around the Facebook issue will have a permanent effect on its share price? Today’s evidence would suggest no. Would a change in the way Nestle manages its social media outreach make any difference? … The financial markets don’t give two hoots.

Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang) –

- While every company has critics, they can now organize a coordinated attack. Every company I work with has some degree of critics, it’s a natural state of the market. Now, these critics may start to organize globally by using similar tools and technologies brands are to market themselves. Expect coordinated and organized attacks from critics.

- Facebook fan page brand-jacking is the new form of tree hugging. As movements form, the organized groups can stage mass attacks on brand Facebook fan pages, overrunning it with negative messages. Like sitting in trees with banners to slow down clear cutting and spray paining messages on buildings, this is simply the digital form of real-world protest. Expect more of this in the future –not less. (Update: interesting perspective on “social media warfare“)

- Ownership isn’t clear –yet the power belongs to community. The brands think they own the Facebook fan pages, but the fans can demonstrate power and take over ownership. When you look closely, neither parties ‘owns’ the property, it belongs to Facebook –but don’t expect them to do much, brands are really on their own.

Cross-posted at 2020 Social: Because Business is Social.