TBO Media Ltd

Back in March, Nestle had quite a negative backfire on their Facebook fan page, resulting from a Greenpeace video campaign which had over 1 million views to urge the company to stop using palm oil in their products due to deforestation and orang-utan deaths. If you missed the video watch it below:

So what happened on Facebook?

A wave a Greenpeace supporters and Facebook users changed their profile pictures to anti-Nestle slogans, and started leaving comments – lots of negative comments.

How did Nestle react?

Badly. The Nestle PR team couldn’t cope with the influx of negative comments, leaving responses such as ‘Oh please… it’s like we’re censoring everything to allow only positive comments’…Just click here to visit the page to get the idea, everything they post gets slated.

Probably not the best reaction to concerned customers. Nestle eventually had to apologise for how they reacted; “We’ve stopped deleting posts, and I have stopped being rude”. They have been true to their word, and there are still thousands of negative comments on the fan page.

What can we learn?

Personally, I don’t think this sort of PR horror story could have been avoided for Nestle. I’m no Eco warrior, but Nestle are cutting down lots of trees and killing orang-utan’s to make KitKats, I can see how that would annoy people – Social media just whipped it up into an angry storm.

That said, it could’ve been managed and responded to better. Nestle should have admitted to the problems, and listened to the concerns of their customers and responded with solutions. Not just deleted comments and started being rude.

Should I avoid Facebook fan pages for my business forever?

Definitely not. Granted, this is an extreme ‘bad case’ of what could happen, but only because Nestle are in the wrong to start out with. If your business has good core values, good customer service and a good product… then I still believe a fan page is great to connect with existing and future customers.

But before you jump on the social media bandwagon – ask yourself how your business would react if you had a negative comment on your fan page. Are you prepared – or would you delete it?