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Empire Avenue – The latest social capital experiment

Wendy Soucie — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 23:12:03 +0000

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Nestle faced with Facebook fiasco | Thoughts on Blogs | Wk 03-21-10

Wendy Soucie — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 12:31:09 +0000

Back in September, I responded to a post by Rick Speciale, a fellow Social Media Academy alumni from Australia who had been

Nestle is learning the hard way about listening to its audience

researching various blue chip companies and how they were managing their social media efforts. His post Nestle Social Media: “Nestea plunge in sentiment and how to fix provided some insight into what, at the time, seemed to be steps into social media – even if it was pushing command and control mentality.

Well, apparently they didn’t learn anything. Here is a copy of a Nestle post from Tech.Blorge off their FaceBook fan page

“The moderator of the Facebook page didn’t take kindly to this, and warned, “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,” before responding to one reply to this by saying, “Thanks for the lesson in manners. Consider yourself embraced. But it’s our page, we set the rules, it was ever thus.””

Here is my September response to Rick’s original post:

My response is backed by information from the Social Media and PR Summit I had recently attended. Paula Berg of Southwest Airlines (and chief social media / blogger) who gave an interesting assessment of what they did wrong in navigating the social media world as they started to blog. They did learn from it and then did do more things right than wrong in the use of social media – specifically blogging, during some troubled times.

Overall, being upfront when problems occur, getting others, including the company to explain how they interpreted the issue, and
being actively engaged with the conversation helped to reduce the sensationalism of each occurrence.

The three examples she provided were:
1) a customer was asked to change their clothes (too revealing). That story hit the bloggers as discrimination and SWA tried to just ignore it. Wrong effort.

2) The second example was a decision to eliminate open seating on SWA flights. It was going to be eliminated based on internal
company opinion. Instead they asked the blogosphere. Over 700 comments were received that indicated they should keep it. And they
did.

3) Last was an incident involving 2 girls who were so badly behaved on a flight that the police were called when they landed. The girls
immediately made videos and held press conferences, claiming they did nothing wrong except they were good looking. This time SWA took immediate action and released interviews from people on the plane, SWA representatives, talked to bloggers and posted their own story on the SWA blog. A much reduced situation to be sure compared to the prior incident.

Listen to your audience

I don’t want to say that issues about airline seating are exactly comparable with dealing with a repressive regime, but what I think this
points out is that authentic communication, listening to your readers and customers, reacting quickly via Internet can help manage
problems and overall keep the trust that customers have with companies.

I think that you are right in suggesting that Nestle needs to have a more visible dialogue with people who eat and invest in Nestle. And what if the overall sentiment is that they should pull out of the current supply chain because of the negative sentiment? I would think they should take the advice or leanings of the public since we know what a viral, Internet-connected crowdsource can do to spread bad info.

Apparently Nestle has not learned much? What do you think?