Home /
-->
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…
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=be3ed227-19fa-4c67-a16d-067e40096ddb)
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.
