April 1, 2010
Greenpeace and Social Media Mob Nestle
Campaign & Advocacy
Appeared on the Enterprise Blog, March 31, 2010
Reports from the front lines in the nasty skirmish between Greenpeace and Nestlé over the company’s purchase of palm oil for its Kit-Kat candy bar and other products suggest that negotiations are in the works. Greenpeace and Nestlé executives are reportedly discussing the campaign and boycott threat.
Capitulation is probably a better word for what’s transpiring. The Swiss food giant has been hammered for more than two weeks by the multinational advocacy group in what is shaping up to be the most successful anti-corporate social media campaign ever.
Greenpeace has long been at odds with Nestlé over a variety of issues, including encouraging mothers to use infant formula that could be mixed with tainted water and for using ingredients made from bioengineered crops.
In its latest salvo, Greenpeace has been seeding social media sites with allegations that Nestlé is contributing to the destruction of Indonesia’s rainforest, exacerbating global warming, and endangering orangutans. It posted a grisly mock commercial of Nestlé’s iconic “Have a Break” Kit-Kat ad on YouTube. The company got it removed from YouTube, which served only to send it viral across the Internet. As part of its orchestrated campaign, Greenpeace supporters stormed Nestlés’s Facebook fan page with nasty posts and swamped Twitter with propaganda focused on Nestlé’s dealings with an Indonesian firm, Sinar Mas, which Greenpeace accuses of destroying rainforests for plantations. Protests took place across Europe as around 100 Greenpeace activists, some dressed as orangutans, went to Nestlé’s headquarters in London, Amsterdam, and Frankfurt, and to seven Nestlé factories across Germany. They called on Nestlé staff to urge the company to stop using palm oil that’s the result of forest destruction.
The day the protest began, on March 19, Nestlé posted a response that it had stopped dealing with the firm, which only supplied 1.25 percent of the all the palm oil it used last year. But Nestlé has said that because palm oil batches are often mixed, it can’t guarantee that some tiny fraction of the oil it uses still doesn’t originate with Sinar Mas. Needless to say, the concession didn’t end the protest.
Deep in damage control, Nestlé appears to have abandoned its Facebook page altogether, leaving it to Kit-Kat bashers, who are now calling for a boycott of all the company’s products. And if things couldn’t be any worse, beleaguered Indonesian palm oil planters are threatening to boycott Nestlé as well for demonizing their livelihood and cutting ties.
The brouhaha has touched off a tsunami of analysis about the increasing role of anti-corporate social media campaigns. Slate’s Bernhard Warner debates whether an ill-prepared Nestlé can ever recover its Facebook page, which is now firmly in the hands of its fiercest critics.
Richard Telofksi, who analyzes corporate social media campaigns on his blog, Irregular Competition, suggests that Greenpeace, though clearly the winner in this campaign, has stepped on the facts to make its case. Other bloggers have weighed in about how to prevent your site from becoming a Trojan horse. The Atlantic’s Niraj Chokshi has her list of what companies can learn from Nestlé’s fumblings.
As hard as it may be for Nestlé to accept, this battle is over. It may just have to let this storm run its course as it takes steps to reorganize its supply chain and begins to rebuild its brand.
Jon Entine is a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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