No. This is not yet another post on a collection of quotes of what others/ media thinks about the Nestle Facebook imbroglio.
This is what I think of it. And, as a customer and a fan of Nestle’s Facebook page.
First, the cardinal sin – the tone!
“Thanks for the lesson in manners. Consider yourself embraced. But it’s our page, we set the rules, it was ever thus.”
“Here, there are some rules we set. As in almost any other forum. It’s to keep things clear.”
???
The obvious question: Would this group manager do the same thing in public? This discussion would look like this in public, in real life.
Nestle puts up a banner outside its HQ saying that people should stop making placards with tweaked Nestle logos. They also shout on a speaker that if they find anyone with a placard with a tweaked Nestle logo, they will use force to remove them from the demonstration. And they do, really! Demonstrators get agitated and start shouting more and more. The noise brings in more demonstrators, for obvious reasons.
Then, Nestle posts this:
“This (deleting logos) was one in a series of mistakes for which I would like to apologize. And for being rude. We’ve stopped deleting posts, and I have stopped being rude.”
I? We? Who exactly are we dealing with here? Nestle, the organization? Or an employee in Nestle, who has been assigned the sorry job of managing this page? Could Nestle get that cleared please?
This…in the real world would look precisely like this…
The loudspeaker messages the demonstrators heard earlier were announced from inside the HQ. People could not see who was shouting so they assumed it was Nestle’s collective voice, as an organization. Then, when the demonstrators’ shouting became a unmanageable din, one sole guy came out of the HQ and used his loudspeaker to apologize for his earlier, condescending tone!
So, here’s the lesson!
Forget PR. Forget social media marketing. Forget social media PR. All those things are very, very relevant, but what is completely ignored and forgotten here is the simple fact that social media mirrors real life. It simply makes distance and time immaterial since it floats in the cloud.
Why is it so difficult to imagine the real life equivalents of social media tools or actions before indulging in them?
Since distance is nullified, people can join from all parts of the world, when things are going from bad to worse. Isn’t the same, when things are going good, the most coveted target for social media agencies – that ‘viral’ thingy? So, why would they/ brands forget that it can work on the reverse too?
Would that person speaking on behalf of Nestle on Facebook dare to say the same thing if he were facing a mob in front of him? What made him assume that it is ok to do so just because he/ she is hiding behind a monitor/ keyboard?
This is not about Nestle’s mistake – it’s a basic, ground-level error in assuming that social media is an exalted platform.
It is not. It is just real life, with minor, nuanced flourishes that gives you that facade of it being an exalted platform.
It’s just a bunch of people. Treat them that way.
Salon’s Andrew Leonard writes, ‘Faced with an angry mob, a functionary commits, then apologizes for, the ultimate P.R. sin – acting human’. Oh sure, Nestle did act ‘human’, but it also treated its audience as morons!
On the real issue – Indonesian rainforests…it seems just like last week when I wondered aloud in this blog if social media is forcing brands to ‘be good’ at the basic level. Heck, it WAS last week indeed!