Greenpeace outed them for using Palm Oil from felled rainforests in their products. It's an ongoing thing. Then Greenpeace put a video up on You Tube featuring someone idly biting into a Kit Kat, and blood pouring down his face. Except it's not a Kit Kat, it's an Oran Utan's finger - they live in the rain forest you see.
So what happened next?
Nestle's lawyers got You Tube to take the video down. Oh dear, again. And then it really kicked off. Nestle's Facebook page was swamped with negative comments, and demands that they stop using the Palm Oil. Worse, Nestle started deleting some negative comments, especially those who had distorted the Nestle logo as their profile pictures.
And then they started getting involved in the row itself, fuelling it, inflating it, on their FB page. Until it hit the media.
The result...
The whole story is here and, frankly, pretty much everywhere else on the net already. It's already doing the rounds as the a case study in disastrous use of Social Media.
Note what Robin Grant from WeareSocial says (my bold)...
“What Nestle did in removing the video was naive. The legal recourse inflames the situation, and brands need to be aware of this. People are acting as a mob today, and the key thing is not to inflame the mob".
Let's take a look at that.
Sure, Nestle shouldn't be using Palm Oil sourced in this way. Sure, Oran Utans should protected. Yes I care. Yes I have stood in a demo (though not about this issue) with a placard myself, and been described as part of a "baying mob" (though we were anything but, frankly). And not virtually either.
But there are aspects of this incident which I find unsettling. Greenpeace - for whom this was priceless publicity - has a view. One for which it is easy to have sympathy. Nestle has a view. One for which it is much harder to feel sympathy, partly because they are a vast, profitable and fairly secretive conglomerate with a very patchy social responsibility record and a reputation as the bete noire of the socially progressive left.
Fact is though, Nestle were lynched, publically, and in the stock market, when they tried to reply, and offered some defence. The person in charge of their FB page has been hung out to dry...the general view is that he, or she, should simply have rolled over and died.
Getting stuck into the fight, when you are fighting a vast and unaccountable population of people of varying levels of knowledge, is probably not a good idea. Far better to have simply listened, and noted.
But I really don't wish to live in a world in which "the key thing is not to inflame the mob".
Mobs act without rationality, without responsibility, with a savagery and an anonymity created by their scale. No-one needs to care very much or know very much to be in a mob, but the collective power of the many can have vast power, as we are seing over and over - now that you can be in one mob, then click through to another page and join a second, from your sofa. This week a nice, right-on issue of animal rights and the environment. Nasty Nestle. Cuddly Greenpeace. Next week, a group forms to smash up the home of a pediatrician in Southern England because no-one can spell paedophile (it happened)?
I have some personal experience of living in fear of the 'mob'. A mob, in my case, created and fuelled by reactionary and conservative society, by the right wing media, and by ignorance. Over an issue about as far removed from the one in which Nestle is involved as it's possible to be, I'd add. And many of those who piled into Nestle on this, I'd add also, might perhaps support me in my cause. I have been on the receiving end of collective hate, randomly and anonymously - words written by people with a casual fleeting prejudice who soon moved on having added their bile to the sum of bile.
The particular issue isn't, as it were, the issue, you see. It's the capacity for this to happen, and for lives to change because of the mob, for better or worse. Just ask the people of Paris in the early 1790s...
Perhaps someone might give that some thought as they see the ramparts of Evil Nestle aflame?
I doubt it though.
