As a Social Media practitioner, I like to observe what blue chip companies are doing in this space and had a good chat with a senior level manager at Nestle several weeks ago to see what their ambitions were. We discussed what they were doing with Social Media and what their objectives are.
This executive was happy with 70,000+ Facebook users joined to one of their Facebook groups. In fact, when I looked, hey had other international groups exceed 100,000 members. Those seem like big numbers and offer some sense of validation.
But it is not always about quantity and I looked into the groups to see what was going on. When I visited those groups, I saw commonly used “agency style tactics” that tend to be viewed as best practice:
- Sponsorship: Giving a potion of sales to building playgrounds for kids
- Use promotions to drive sales of candy bars
Let’s be clear though, Social Media is not marketing. Social Media is about being social and fostering relationships that include an exchange of value.
The thing that separates the Social Media chaf from the high performers is the quality of dialogue in the community. It is not just group members saying “I love this product” even though there is no shortage of those declaring their love of Nestle chocolate (My highschool days include great sugar highs off of Nestle Crunch).
On first observation, I did not see many real conversations going on in the Nestle groups and always remain sceptical about paid bloggers and employees creating self validating comments.
Again, Social Media is about being SOCIAL! Not just about promotions, PR and marketing tactics. The promotions tactics will become old hat soon and I would be more ambitious with my social investment than to excite ~300 people out of 70,000 each time a promo is run.
As I looked further into one group, I noticed something else - HEAPS of negative sentiment! Apparently, this is because of Nestle’s operations in Zimbabwe where, facing a shrinking pool of suppliers, they have elected to buy from Gushungo Dairy Estate (reportedly owned or controlled by the Mugabe regime). Here is a link to the Guardian site for an explanation http://tinyurl.com/ybb5axq. Note that the Guardian tends to have more of a left wing bias when reading.
The Zimbabwe issue is an important one. However, it is not something the business cannot overcome.
China has an abysmal track record on human rights and no one will forget many people died in Tiananmen square (and wonder how many deaths were not reported).
Do consumers refuse to buy products from companies that use China as a manufacturing center? Yes, here is a site with a slogan Don’t Feed The Dragon http://home.ioa.com/~vampire/ (can you imagine how many things you own that would disappear if you boycotted Chinese made products?)
With the global economic mess, don’t be surprised to see more protectionist themes come about. Based on past history, this stuff only kills the world economy and there is documented evidence that this behaviour fuelled the negative effects of the Great Depression. Count me as one of those not interested in going there.
Back to Nestle…
From a Social Media practitioner point of view, the real story is not determining if Nestle supports the Mugabe regime. The real story was that few if anyone within the Nestle Facebook group actually sticks up for Nestle when this is going on. Where are all of those people who said “I love Nestle”? Those well worded PR releases don’t seem to be inspiring them http://tinyurl.com/yc2e3ww.
Nestle is no different from any other multi-national and has to deal with this problem. It is not about making a political judgement on their activities. I am only interested in the business challenge they face and how they deal with it.
I believe Nestle could be more open and contribute more in conversations with users to develop real social relationships with customers and create powerful advocacy that is currently lacking. Maybe they could consult with the masses using the wonderful new concept of crowd sourcing for ideas on how best to handle the situation.
There is this wonderful intra office politics tactic that has stood the test of time. Example: One manager does not want to stick their neck out on the line, calls a meeting, puts a problem on the table (not actually giving a position on the problem), then ensues a chain reaction of people looking at each other asking “what do you think?” Consensus is drawn to mitigate risk when the responsibility of a decision is shifted to others.
Using this metaphor, Good Social Media Strategy assimilates the customer into the organisation as if they are a part of the decision making. Put the customer in the shoes of the company – having to deal with a real world problem. Nestle has a much better chance of gaining empathy this way.
The upshot is that customers don’t see it as corporate CYA – they see it as respect for their opinion and a stake in the business (and they often give free advice without requiring stock options ☺).
Powerful advocacy emerges from this in ways that marketing and PR cannot accomplish. This buys more margin for error in the relationship as well, which lowers the cost of doing business.
In summary, Nestle is a good example of a company attempting to embrace social media and get it right. The painful lesson is that it is not just as simple as putting up a Facebook or Twitter account and it is not just about PR and marketing. It is about developing meaningful and deep relationships with customers as well as being approachable. It takes time to develop those kinds of deep connections. When those relationships are established, they will either protect or guide the business to profit.
Time for Nestle to take the full Social Media plunge.
Rick S.
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Rick:
ReplyDeleteI believe your key phrase here is "fostering relationships that include an exchange in value."
Social media increases the transparency of a company and it's practices. Therefore if a company is going to use such tactics, their values should be aligned with those customers they hope to communicate with. This isn't the first time Nestle has gotten themselves in hot water.
There is a fundamental problem with the social media for marketing "fad". Yes, I am purposefully using "fad" here. By attempting to take advantage of the buzz around in this case Facebook, Nestle and Nestle's customers have both entered into a contract without understanding what each party in the relationship wants. In effect, the conversation never happened. As social media consultants, how do we get our clients to see that "alignment" means more today than yesterday and it will mean even more tomorrow.
Like thier coffee or not, this is one of the reason I like to observe Starbucks. Not just from a social media perspective, but how they use social media to reinforce thier business values and practices.
Nice post by the way. I applaud your picking a topic that has tendrils to the larger issue of corporate ethics and responsibility.
Rick:
ReplyDeleteI like your observations ut have an issue with your conclusions about what Nestle should do.I don't think that gaining concensus on their operations in Zimbabwe is the way to go. They should either clarify their practices if, indeed, people have the wrong information or change their practices. Alternatively, they could stand up for their practices if they don't want to change - for example, pointing out they are providing an income to people who would otherwise be destitute. I would consider this an "Iffy" stance, but this seems like a situation where taking responsibility, not concensus buiding would serve Nestle well.
One of the advantages of having a social media presence is that the company has the opportunity to have a dialog directly with their detractors as opposed to having negative comments spread wildly without their point of viewattached to them. I do agree that Nestles should be taking advantage of this opportunity to answer their detractors, not looking the other way.
Rick,
ReplyDeleteI just recently attended a conference with 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 not thing 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.
Much reduced situation compared to the prior incident.
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.
I just came across this as I was doing research to finish up a series of posts I have been doing on Nestle and its major PR and social media failings.
ReplyDeleteThe timing of your post is interesting, in that it went up on the same day that Nestle had a bunch of bloggers visiting its US headquarters and a major twitter backlash started, fueled to a great extent by an open letter I wrote to the attendees on my blog:
http://www.phdinparenting.com/2009/09/29/an-open-letter-to-the-attendees-of-the-nestle-family-blogger-event/
You can see the many other posts on the issue via the trackbacks on that post.
I'll be finishing my series on Nestle with a post on how I think they should use social media. I plan to link to your post in that.