The link between crisis management and social media

 

In 2010, Greenpeace posted a video on YouTube where they re-made a commercial from Nestlé’s brand KitKat. Instead of the man in the video eating a chocolate, he starts chewing on an orangutan’s finger, and the slogan was changed from: “Have a break, have a KitKat” to “Give the orangutans a break”. The video was meant as an accusation against Nestlé for buying palm oil from Sinar Mas, an Indonesian company known for destroying protected areas and harming the orangutans. Nestlé asked YouTube to remove the video, allegedly due to copyright issues. The video was removed, but it had already caused a big stir and thousands of people posted the video on Twitter, Facebook and other social media forums.

What Nesté did was to reply to angry comments on their Facebook profile in a defensive and arrogant way and went as far as deleting some of their “fans”. This strategy resulted in their 90 000-member fan page on Facebook becoming a forum for hatred and criticism towards Nestlé. However, a quick action from the top management where they went out and apologized and cancelled its agreement with Sinar Mas avoided the issue to spin off and become a real crisis for the company.

What this case shows us is how increasingly important social media is becoming when dealing with crisis management. Whoever Nestlé had put in charge of communication through social media was clearly not well enough qualified and the situation required that the top management took over the situation. This might be caused by a lack of clear communication objectives, which leads to the question of how mismanagement of internal communication can affect external stakeholders’ perspective of an organization.

To put the power of social media into perspective, the Financial Times states that each day more than 10 million people become a “fan” of a brand on Facebook, with the most popular ones being brands such as Coca-Cola and Starbucks. This number clearly indicates that social media has to be managed in a professional manner, and what is communicated through Facebook has to be inline with the communication objectives and vision of the company.

So our question to you is how you think organizations should communicate through social media? Should it be a platform for an open dialogue between the organization and the stakeholders, or should it simply be used as a platform for one-way communication.