The Twitter mob jumped on Nestle yesterday after it was allegedly heavy-handed in a comment stream on a Facebook fan page.
Week-in-week-out the social media mob passes judgement on brands that cock-up online. The speaker circuit is littered with case studies of #failed companies such as Eurostar, Paperchase, Habitat and Vodafone.
Here’s the issue: the instantaneous nature of communication in a network means that we no longer stop and think and everyone has an audience. Speculation is shared and the mob quickly turns it into fact. Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Brunix have first hand experience.
The Nestle page may not even be real. It could be a fake set-up as a double bluff by activists.
Mat Morison makes the point that social media practitioners are incredibly quick to criticise and pass judgement.
“Kerry Gaffney and I once came up with a rule-of-thumb: “don’t be too quick to jump in because there but for the grace of God go you.” It sounds sententious, but we reckoned that it would pay off in time; people would, we felt, be less likely to jump on us when we inevitably #failed.”
Sound advice.
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Social comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by speedcomms: Why are we so quick to criticise? (Nestle Facebook page may be fake) http://goo.gl/fb/Yph2 (@wadds) #business #pr…
It may be fake, but mix this with the Greenpeace Palm Oil viral, and the facebook mess up and you have something that may be effecting the companies share price, I have been tracking the share price and cross referencing it against the online opinion and – they are both dropping at the moment – next week could be an interesting one for Nestle, and it’s shareholders!
Fake or not.
http://www.asabailey.com/viral-ads/nestle-share-price-drops-in-responce-to-palm-oil-viral-campaign.html
Asa, I pointed out over at the http://www.contently-managed.com/blog that it’s not the first online spat Nestle have had. In the past they’ve had family blogger rows and tried to buy URLs of their critics, so I’m spotting a trend that appears to show a corporation’s true face – they like to bully or buy their way out of trouble.
Wadds, as always, a good post. I don’t know about people being polite to others though because there will always be someone arrogant enough – or ignorant enough – to just jump in and criticise.
Stephen – Stop being a twit. The Facebook page is real and you know it. Nestle could have contacted Facebook and had a “fake” page taken down within minutes of becoming aware of it. Facebook is excellent about policing fake pages, or pages run by people who don’t represent companies.
A better question is, why are you a Nestle apologist? Shareholder, or do you just not understand that a single individual has completely destroyed what little social media goodwill they had?
See Craig McGill’s comments above – this isn’t the first time Nestle has bungled social media like that, although this might be the last.
Bonochromatic – I’m not an apologist for Nestle at all. Or a shareholder for that matter. And you’re spot on. If it was a false page Nestle would have asked Facebook to pull it by now.
My response is purely driven by gut instinct. As a news journalist I would have been expected to second source the Nestle story. We’ve lost any degree of primary scrutiny in social media.
Asa/Craig – So you’ve done your research and Nestle has form. Fair play.
[...] And, hey, maybe it didn’t. [...]