Social media for the Paranoid

There is nothing more hip for a brand than to have a Facebook Fan Page – where your followers will become your friends. But what happens when you attract the wrong sort of follower, and they turn on you? Well as Nestlé (a tiny multinational with only $100 billion in revenue) found out, they really don’t own their own Fan Page. Now they are considering deleting their Facebook page and having a break from Social Media.  As they say  ”Have a break….have a Kitkat”, or perhaps now “Have a Kitkat….take a (Social Media) break”?

So the story is summarized in the WSJ and it reads rather like David versus Goliath. In this case Greenpeace UK decided to target Nestlé over its purchase of palm oil from an Indonesian supplier called Sinar Mas that is apparently involved in illegal rainforest clearing in Indonesia. This has badly affected the orang-utans that live there.

Now as it happens I used to live in Borneo as well. While I am not as cute as an orang-utan, I am significantly less hairy and nimble. So I was reduced to cursing as they swung from trees and stole the shiny tools out of my hands as I sweated beside my Schlumberger logging truck. The deforestation was bad then – primarily for hard woods, and it has become much worse since. The impact has been severe for the native Dayaks and Ibans, who are close to extinction. Alongside the Dayak custom of headhunting – and shrinking the head (by boiling in a sort of ancient version of biological washing powder) they were particularly fond of piercing their earlobes and gradually inserting larger and larger wooden plugs in the resulting hole.  When they worked for me I insisted that they pin the dangling ear lobe out of the way of the heavy machinery – in case they literally pinned their ears back. They chewed gum especially for this task, and in one deft movement they stuck the gum and their ear lobes neatly behind their ears. The when they finished they unstuck their earlobes and finished chewing the gum.

So Greenpeace followed the example of First Priority Mortgage in their attack on FDIC – which I covered in March, and created a cute little video which altered the KitKat logo to become “KitKat Killer”.

As has been well documented in the media Nestlé demanded the video be  taken down from YouTube (as FDIC did), YouTube obliged as any multi-billion dollar brand would have done. And Greenpeace moved to Vimeo – the big winner so far in this farce.

Then the assembled masses became Facebook “Friends” of Nestle and proceeded to steal its shine. Nestlé got very upset about users using the altered Kitkat logo as their facebook picture and told them “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.”

The ensuing media storm must have occupied alot of management time – it certainly forced Nestlé to move fast and clarify their position on not using Sinar Mas Palm oil.

There are no shortage of pundits with advice to Nestlé on what they should have done. This ranges from deleting the Fan Page to sucking it up and keeping the page up.

The bigger lesson is that even something as mundane as moderating a Social Media site is a vital part of building and maintaining a brand, and requires just as much care and attention as any advertising campaign. In other words, don’t employ a monkey to do an orang-utan’s job.