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No. There’s no TGIF for your Social Media Monitoring team. It’s ON DUTY, 24/7, 365. That all the time, all of the time folks. This is one of the lessons learned from last months cyber activism attack on Nestlé’s Facebook page.
To summarize; Greenpeace took issue with Nestlé’s use of palm-oil as a key ingredient in many of its products, among others, the well known Kit Kat chocolate bar (Have A Break, Have A Kit Kat). The need for cheep palm oil drives deforestation and destroys carbon rich landscapes. Specifically, burning of rain-forests and peatlands to clear land for palm oil production releases significant amounts of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere while disrupting wildlife habitats.
Enter the Greenpeace viral video campaign: A 60 second video clip is posted to YouTube showed an office worker having a Kit Kat break. Opening the chocolate wrapper, he finds an orang-utan finger inside. Message; give the orang-utan a break, stop Nestlé buying palm oil from companies that destroy the rainforests.
Nestlé’s response? Notifying YouTube that the visual identity of their brand had been infringed by Greenpeace. Effect: The video is taken down and supporters of Greenpeace feel censored. Next, they upload the video to other social media sharing sites. What’s more, rather than being discussed on blogs, activists now move the debate on Nestlé’s reponse to their own Facebook page. But wait, its Friday! There are places to go, things to do, people to meet… for Nestlé’s social media monitoring team.
Meanwhile angry comments flooded the Nestlé Facebook page. Response to criticism was slow, and when it came, it was reactive, focusing on defining rules for the discussion participants, rather than addressing the issues raised. The forum participants only got more agitated and soon enough, the discussion moved beyond the Greenpeace activists community, attracting mainstream and environmentally conscious Facebook users.
Lesson; When negative reactions surface, your social media monitoring team has to catch it. A wait and see attitude will only leave you to respond with reactions and that’s no way to show initiative. Early on in this controversy Nestlé did for example announce that it was ending its relationship with the palm oil supplier in question. However stuck with an seemingly inexperienced (and unprofessional) social media team, Nestlé got caught in a reactive response pattern, letting this announcement drift by without barely making a dent in the discussion boards.
Conclusion; If you encourage people to interact with your company through social media, you have to be there and be prepared to respond when the s#*t hits the fan… Social media is a two way street, so you can’t choose just to include the positive and sensor the negative. AND; There’s no TGIF for a social media team with a job to do. Social media monitoring tools were created for a reason, do not ignore them just because there’s a weekend coming up…
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From time to time, we get the question “what’s the risk of not having a social media monitoring tool?” The question reveals a perception that “social media is just an add-on to other media outlets”. It’s not. Social media has a different set of rules and is reshaping entire markets.
With social media, people are engaging and interacting around context, not necessarily personal relationships. Whereas we used to connect around place (neighborhood, community, schools, associations, etc.) we now link to online personas that share our intellectual interest and emotions. For many, traditional media is no longer the main source of information. Increasingly people turn to social media looking for “someone just like like me” and consequently, many blogs and forums discussions are more important in shaping opinions and perceptions than traditional media outlets.
Likewise, PR and marketing campaigns are no longer about one-to-many communication by distributing press releases and pushing “call to action”. Via social media monitoring tools, companies connect and interact with people that have expressed interest in a particular topic.
Still, the strategy of reaching out to people of influence has not changed. PR and marketing efforts still try to connect with “trust agents” that are likely to pass on a particular message to their networks. In effect, successful campaign management is engaged in one-to-one-to-many communications. The PR or marketing message gets forwarded from one-to-one-to-many if it connects with the interests of the person receiving it, AND if it provides value to his/her network.
The main challenge for companies using social media is therefore the blurring between marketing and communication. Marketers want to use it to sell, communicators to build relationships. Of course, social media is very much about being a real member of a community and providing value, rather than just chasing the next sale. That increases the number of people a company has to deal with, requiring more time and investment in building relationships.
The effect of social media monitoring and interaction will have a profound effect on the PR and marketing industry as we know it. PR and marketing efforts is increasingly about connecting with real people and because everyone is involved in a network, it’s not just up to the people working in the PR and marketing departments. A well thought out strategy will leverage the connections of the entire organization, leaving a more profound, valuable and documentable impact than any traditional campaign could ever hope for.
Want to start listening in on social media conversations? Sign up for the free trial of the Imooty social media monitoring tool today.
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The Communication Summit is the yearly highlight for PR and Communication professionals in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. During a panel discussion on online PR and communication, Mr. Volker Gaßner from Greenpeace, made an interesting contribution to the topic of online reputation monitoring.
Greenpeace does online reputation monitoring of companies they see as “greenwashing” their corporate image (i.e. claiming without merit that they are green and sustainable). He used an example of RWE, a large energy provider, who recently hired a high profile PR and marketing agency to create a video to improve their corporate image. The video depicts an animated version of the energy giant planting windmills, wave power generators and fixing broken power lines.
In fact, only 2% of RWE’s energy comes from green and sustainable energy and Greenpeace sees the RWE video as a typical “greenwashing” campaign. Accordingly, Greenpeace re-cut and altered the video to be shown on a TV monitor, sitting in a wasteland of nuclear energy plants (RWE owns 5 of them in Germany).
After only a few weeks the Greenpeace response has almost as many YouTube views as the original, it backfired.
Mr. Dieter Zetsche, Chairman of the Board of Management at Daimler AG, also addressed the topic at his opening Keynote to the Communication Summit. The challenges for PR and communication professionals in communicating green technology efforts are indeed real. It is not only a complex and difficult technology to understand (especially in the car industry), it is also easy to fall for the temptation of playing with statistics and nice imagery.
Mr. Zetsche concluded that only communication of real substance is likely to gain trust and goodwill. It is also safe to assume that Greenpeace, as well as competitors, will continue with online reputation monitoring, to keep track of greenwashing and misleading advertising.
Imooty attended Berlin’s 4th conference multimedia start-up’s yesterday. We were pleased to present our mobile news application at the conference, which is a forum for multimedia and technology start-ups to network with prospective investors. It took place in the former DDR movie theater “Kosmos” in East Berlin.
This year’s motto was to collaborate and succeed in a time of economic crisis and Mr Kaczorowski, Director of Internet Business Solutions at Cisco Systems AG, held the keynote address. He told us how Cisco, one of the world’s largest networking equipment and network management suppliers didn’t had to cancel its annual leadership conference. Instead, new ‘live size’ video conference applications enabled them to organize a 3 day online conference for top level management world wide. Later, we were pleased to share Imooty’s collaborative mobile news features with the conference participants.
Another presentation by Dr. Martin Kupp, from European School of Management and Technology in Berlin, dealt with the fundamental question: how to stay longer on the market? The Queen of pop, Madonna would serve as an example for success as her biography is a textbook example for marketing and PR strategies.
In short the reccomendations were as follows;
- Move with the flow and endorse new technologies; Madonna boldly promoted MTV’s use of music videos already in 1983.
- Break some rules; Madonna has questioned sexual and religious tabus her entire career.
- Blend with the up-and coming, Madonna has collaborated with young artists and got good coverage as she kissed Britney Spears in the MTV Video Awards in 2003.
As for the exhibition, we had our own stand somewhere in the middle, presenting Imooty’s Media Monitoring solutions. As expected, the financial crisis dominated the general mood at the conference, and proved to be an excellent occasion to present Imooty as a concrete way for companies to save money on online reputation management services in trying times.
And the Gummy Bears at our stand, courtesy of Profund, FU, was a huge hit among fellow exhibitors as well as investors.
Create your online monitoring tool and start following mobile news today!
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