These concepts are crucial in media studies; particularly social media crisis since these provide theoretical values by which we can analyse the content and context of crisis. They provide a rich source, which inspires the analysis of various phenomena and a significant approach for research regarding public relation practices. The concepts of frame and face have been utilised in analysing the interaction and communication in terms of organizational context and “have so far only been studied in relation to organizational crisis” (Johansson as cited in Ihlen, Ruler and Fredriksson, 2009). The front and back region are important in the situation and context analysis involving public and communication of organizational and interpersonal sides.
The report will mainly employ primary evidence including images, screenshots, and comments from two main social media sites: Vimeo and Facebook, in addition to websites of Greenpeace and Nestlé. This way, we can get as close as possible to what happened and why it happened. It reflects directly the participators’ opinions and the intension of the past. However, some reported data could be still be used to build multiple perspectives and understand the historical context.
Analysis
Context
Nestlé crisis occurred since the face they have been trying to create and maintain through their performance in front of public is not consistent with the company’s line in private. When the backstage region of Nestlé was discovered, it shocked the public, spread across global quickly through social media, and consequently led to the crisis.
Nestlé had created a face with good reputation and positive image in building economic and social values. In their website, the Business principles, statements and policies have been the foundation to show Nestlé’s concern, priority and commitment on creating shared value, corporate social responsibility, in particular the environmental sustainability.
Figure 1: Nestlé Creating Shared Value (CSV) Pyramid (Nestle, n.d.)
Nestlé (2010) stressed “Nestlé’s environmental stewardship is guided by three principles: our responsibility towards society, present and future; our desire to delight consumers; our dependence on a sustainable environment that can provide the high quality resources we need to make good food and beverages”. Nestlé (2010) pointed out “The supplier must operate with care for the environment and ensure compliance with all applicable laws and regulations in the country where products or services are manufactured or delivered’ and the breach of this will cause for the losing Nestlé as a customer”. This policy got the valuable feedback from range of customers, society and partners. These refer to the front stage region where Nestlé’s performance is given to maintain and represent their certain standards.
However, in fact, the organization’s line in private (backstage) was different from what they were trying to express in public. Nestlé used palm oil as major material in some productions, i.e. Kit Kat. The supplier for Nestlé is Sinar Mas, Indonesian largest producer of palm oil, was destroying the Indonesia’s rainforests, pushing the orang-utans to the risk of extinction and increasing the climate change. Sinar Mas also failed to comply with Ministry of Forestry regulations and Timber Cutting Permits when clearing forestland for palm oil plantations (Greenpeace, 2010). Though Sinar Mas had been breaking the code of Nestlé’s policy on sustainability for suppliers, Nestlé continued its partnership.
Content:
Realizing the inconsistency between the policy Nestlé had published and their actual activities, Greenpeace launched the campaign against the company on 17 March 2010. The essential elements of the campaign were the “Have a break” video posted on Youtube, the “killer logo”, a clear call to action “ask Nestle to give rainforest a break”.
Figure 3: "Killer" logo and a tagline. (Greenpeace, 2010)
However, Nestlé “had Greenpeace’s video removed from YouTube in an apparent attempt to silence the environmental organisation’s efforts to expose the truth that some of its most popular brands use palm oil from destroyed rainforests and peat lands.” (Greenpeace, 2010)
Greenpeace found an alternative site, Vimeo.com, to post the video. This quickly received the public responses with 78,000 views within few hours. (Team Position 2, n.d.). Many viewers leaved their comments on Vimeo.com to show their negative attitude toward this issue:
“Thank you Nestlé ... I would never have seen this video if you hadn't had it kicked off You Tube. Now I'm forwarding it all my friends, though Facebook, and guess what they are forwarding it to all their mates. Fire your PR team. They are Muppets”. (Vimeo, 2010)
“Big companies must think we are very stupid trying to subdue information that they don't like. All Nestlé products are now banned from my office for that reason alone.” (Vimeo, 2010)
“Thank you Nestlé, I'd never have heard of it without you stupidly and falsely DMCA'ing it on YouTube. What do they claim to own the copyright on anyone eating a chocolate bar on YT now? Eh?” (Vimeo, 2010)
“Good work! Continue to do own goals like that til you take your horrible 'chocolate'-margarine elsewhere...esp. if it's endangering the rainforest.”(Vimeo, 2010)
The message got across globally, reached millions of people via many social media outlets, especially Facebook where the firestorm for the crisis started. The Facebook fan page of Nestlé was flooded with many “profile pics with creative versions of the Nestlé logo along with derogatory comments about the company’s environmental practices” (Martin, 2010).
“I like some Nestle products so I qualify as a "fan". I would like Nestle to make them even better by removing palm oil. I would like to enjoy my Kit-Kats without feeling responsible for rainforest destruction and orang-utan deaths. Please listen to what your customers are telling you” (Nestlé Facebook fan page, 2010)
Figure 4: Comments on Nestlé’s Facebook fan page. (Nestlé Facebook fanpage, 2010)
“How dare you use doves of peace in your logo? Apart from not wanting baboons to die, I don't want to EAT palm oil.” (Nestlé Facebook fanpage, 2010)
“Kit Kats killed my father, and raped my mother!” (Nestlé Facebook fan page, 2010)
Furthermore, many Facebook users decided to set up their own page named: “” which is “initially set up in retaliation to the arrogant responses on the official Nestle fan page” (, 2010)
(, 2010)
The issues continued generating the overwhelming buzz in other social media sites like Twitter and blogosphere where from 13 March to 20 March, an analysis in Twitter revealed that there were 18,000 followers with 215,000 tweets (Team position 2, n.d.).
Figure 5: The number of reached people via 50 Tweets. (Douglas, 2010)
Figure 6: Number of tweets for a day. (Douglas, 2010)
Figure 7: The trend for daily activity on blogs according to the Blog pulse. (Douglas, 2010)
The issue went mainstream crossing over social media to traditional media and become the major social media controversy. The wave of social media responses had showed up the inconsistency between the face and line of Nestle by using evidence like pictures, videos and comments
Figure 8: Source share of voice for the Nestlé’s issue. (Team position2, n.d.)
The support for a positive image of Nestles has fallen by the rapid spread of the message. These had emphasized to frame the situation in which Nestle was an unethical organization that failed to comply with its own standards and placed the interest of profit before the social responsibility. This had damaged the reputation of Nestlé. The risk of losing face for Nestle emerged due to “information is brought forth in some way about organization social worth which cannot be integrated” and “lack of judgmental support” (Goffman, 1967, p.8). According to Goffman (1967) “The manner and bearing may falter, collapse and crumble” (p.8)
Figure 9: The negative mentions of Nestle between Feb and Jun 2010. (Team position 2, n.d.)
Figure 10: Nestles' share falling. (Nestlé Facebook fanpage, 2010)
Outcomes
When the face was threatened, the face work for Nestlé, especially the corrective process, was taking place. Corrective process occurs when “one or more participants find themselves in an established state of ritual disequilibrium or disgrace, and an attempt must be made to re-establish a satisfactory ritual state for them” (Goffman, 1967, p.19). The process tried to repair the damage that was done by the inconsistency with the message that “Nestle remain committed to ending deforestation of rainforests, building trust and working together with others who share this commitment”. (Nestlé, 2010)
On their Facebook Fanpage (2010), Nestle responded to the crisis by: “To repeat: 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.” and “Thanks for the lesson in manners. Consider yourself embraced. But it’s our page, we set the rules, it was ever thus.”
This brought about a further wave of protest until the moderator apologised on 19 March 2010: “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.”(Nestlé Facebook fanpage, 2010)
Moreover, on the same date, in response to the negative reactions of the public, Nestlé had released some important documents including “Nestlé Responsible Sourcing Guidelines”, “Nestlé commitments on Deforestation and Forest Stewardship” and “Letter to Greenpeace”. Nestlé (2010) stressed “we have stopped all purchase of palm oil from Sinar Mas. This will continue as long as there is verifiable evidence of rainforest destruction by that company. Our past purchase of palm oil from Sinar Mas was limited to supplying our factories in Indonesia, and we have now identified alternative Indonesian suppliers from whom we purchase. We have pledged to source only certified sustainably sourced palm oil by 2015”. Furthermore, “Nestlé’s ambition therefore, is to ensure that its products have not led to deforestation and that Nestlé and its suppliers are responsible stewards1 of the forests and forested areas from which they are sourcing materials.” (Nestle, 2010)
Figure 11: Nestlé’s desire to use sustainable Palm oil (Nestlé Facebook fanpage, 2010)
Additionally, according to Douglas (2010), on 21 March, Nestlé allowed the banned video “Have a break” to appear back to on YouTube many times with 180,000 views: “This was the first truly global case of social media changing the business landscapes”.
(Douglas, 2010)
Conclusion
Nestlé’s social media crisis has provided some important lessons for the role of a PR agency in future crisis communication and management.
Immediate Responses:
When information can spread across global through social media quickly, immediate responses are essential to ensure that the crisis will be defused quickly with the lowest level of disruption. It is critical to handle the crisis as soon as the organization can with honest and factual information.
The mistake of Nestlé is that “Rather than address the issue at hand, Nestlé antagonized its followers until the story morphed into “Nestlé tries to censor Greenpeace and Facebook”. In the end, the company drew far more attention to the palm oil issue than warranted and handed Greenpeace a decisive PR victory” (Martin, 2010).
Establish a rule of Engagement:
Another mistake of Nestlé is “it's like we're censoring everything to allow only positive comments" (Nestlé Facebook fanpage, 2010). Nestle failed to understand “when you engage in social media you are giving people a stage to complain about your brand – and that goes as part of embracing social media as marketing." (Griffin cited in Stafford, 2010)
Therefore, companies should introduce clear policies, which outline the rules of engagement for participants on fanpage. These include the requirements about comments and information people are posting. These allow us to remove the inappropriate or inflammatory comments without appearing to be a reactionary censor. Furthermore, this gives participants the feeling of being respected for their comments when moderator is not allowed to remove the post that disadvantages the company.
"Some people think putting up a Facebook page is quick and easy and you can just leave it, but that is an extremely dangerous way to approach it because it needs to be considered at a higher level. You need to think about whether you will delete comments, if a legitimate criticism is made, then think about how you approach it, think about how you deal with conversations and so on." (Griffin cited in Stafford, 2010).
Establish an effective crisis management or PR team:
When Nestle did not have a good crisis management plan, there were more difficulties in handling the crisis. Thus, it is essential to create a team consisting of people who are skilled, trained and have experience in social media and crisis management. They should always be fully prepared with effective crisis management plans, know how to set up alerts, stay engaged, keep up with the latest buzz and handle with the problems quickly. A team has the comprehensive communication strategy to monitor, moderate the conservation and build up the relationship with customers on the social media with the respectful, professional manners. “PR online is not very different from PR offline when it comes to the fundamentals, and Brands need people who understand the psyche of the online user more than people who merely know their way around social media. (Lessons every Brand can learn from the Nestle fiasco, 2010). When Social media is “long term project” for any business, an effective PR team will be the most significant factor contributing the success of business in future.
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