Companies need to be careful and strategic in how they handle negative issues and crisis situations on social media (Cornelissen, J. P., 2017, p. 191-227). Preferably, companies should be willing to apologize and express sympathy as quickly as possible when something goes wrong (Schultz, F., 2011, p. 21). This is important for companies to remember because social media can often have a way of making user-generated content go viral through collaborative sharing amongst individuals (Cornelissen, J. P., 2017, p. 38-39, 46).
If a company doesn’t apologize and express sympathy as soon as possible when facing a negative situation, it can sometimes create an opportunity for stakeholders to “organize themselves for action” against that organization (Cornelissen, J. P., 2017, p. 50). When this happens, it can often have a negative impact on a company’s reputation (Schultz, F., 2011, p. 21).
One company that could have been more thoughtful in how they handled a negative situation is the Nestle company. In 2010, a company called Greenpeace posted a spoof video on YouTube that accused Nestle of using unsustainable palm oil from Indonesia in their products. In this video, a man opens a Kit Kat bar and ends up consuming an orangutan finger instead of chocolate. This video was posted by Greenpeace as a way of making the statement that Nestle needed to set a better example for other companies in the food and drink industry (Cornelissen, J. P., 2017, p. 53-54).
When Greenpeace posted this video, Nestle was taken by surprise and asked YouTube to take it down for copyright infringement. However, this action only made more people angry. As a result, thousands of protestors and consumers posted negative comments on Nestle’s Facebook page. In response to this, the moderator of Nestle’s social media pages countered the negative feedback with some very angry and bitter comments. This, of course, only upset more people. Within a day later, the video was reposted by Greenpeace and viewed by over 300,000 people. This video, combined with Nestle’s negative responses to protesters, then spread all over the news and “severely damaged” Nestle’s reputation (Cornelissen, J. P., 2017, p. 54-55).
In this story, Nestle ruined their own reputation by failing to react to protesters in an appropriate way (Cornelissen, J. P., 2017, p. 53-55). I think this was largely due to the fact that they didn’t have a strong social media strategy in place at the time to deal with these kinds of situations. A better approach would have been for Nestle to be more apologetic and show more sympathy toward their protesters for what Nestle had done wrong. Nestle should have also jumped at the chance to make things right as soon as they discovered that the spoof video existed. This would have saved them a major ding on their reputation.
Thankfully though, Nestle did eventually change its tactics to “engage with its critics” in a more positive and productive way. Proof of this effort can be seen when Nestle added Peter Blackshaw to their corporate communication team as their “Global Head of Digital and Social Media” in 2011 (Cornelissen, J. P., 2017, p. 55; Neff, J., 2011, par. 1-9). Thanks to Blackshaw, Nestle has now regained much of its reputation with its stakeholders. As of October of 2012, “Nestle is now [considered to be] the 12th most reputable brand in the world” (Reuters, 2012, 2:21).
References:
Cornelissen, J. P. (2017). Corporate Communication: A Guide to Theory and Practice. London, GB: SAGE Publications.
Neff, J. (2011, February 04). Nestle Hires Pete Blackshaw as Global Digital Chief. Retrieved June 1, 2019, from https://adage.com/article/news/nestle-hires-nielsen-s-blackshaw-global-digital-chief/148679.
Reuters. (2012, October 26). Nestle: Engagement in a hostile digital world. Retrieved June 1, 2019, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HD_W3EMuC1U&feature=player_embedded.
Schultz, F., Utz, S., & Göritz, A. (2011). Is the medium the message? Perceptions of and reactions to crisis communication via twitter, blogs and traditional media. Public Relations Review,37(1), 20-27.
