Nestlé’s Facebook Fail
If you take a look at Nestlé’s Facebook Fan Page you’d be surprised at the amount of activity and messages from angry fans talking about boycotting the company’s products and showing off altered Kit Kat logos, while Nestlé’s fan page administrators hide their heads in the sand.
It all started with a Greenpeace campaign against the destruction of rainforest in Indonesia, the natural habitat of an endangered species, the orangutan: Palm oil producer Sinar Mas is responsible of environmental crimes that led Unilever and Kraft into canceling their contracts with them, and Greenpeace urged Nestlé to do the same with an aggressive video on YouTube.
YouTube removed the video after the Swiss multinational complained about copyright infringements. Currently Greenpeace is hosting the video on its site and inviting users to share it on social networks, while Nestlé fans are posting the same videos on Nestlé’s Facebook fan page.
How not to use Social Media
If the Greenpeace campaign wasn’t enough, Nestlé’s sparkled the Facebook riot when the fan page administrator warned fans that their messages would be canceled in case they used altered Nestlé logos as Facebook profile pictures.
The illusion of being able to control their own fan page shattered after some sarcastic and condescending comments by the fan page administrator, in reply to users criticizing this announcement, just called for more angry complaints. The online reputation management nightmare continued when instead of apologizing and trying to engage in honest conversations with consumers on a democratic platform, explaining how they were willing to address the problem, Nestlé replied angrily to fans until the amount of negative sentiment expressed against the company was unsustainable.
Nestlé’s Facebook Fan Page screenshot taken from Rosamundwo.com
On March 17th Nestlé issued an official statement about palm oil expressing their commitment towards using “Certified Sustainable Palm Oil” by 2015, and claiming that they are not buying palm oil from Sinar Mas. According to Nestlé, the Swiss multinational is only using a measly 0.7% of the global palm oil supplies: Palm oil is also used in animal feeding, bio fuels, household items such as soap and detergent.
Nestlé’s stock price has been dropping on Monday, but it quickly bounced back above CHF54.
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