In 2010, during a campaign against Nestlé’s use of palm oil, Greenpeace invited members to post creative versions of Nestlé’s logo on the company’s Facebook page. The (anonymous) moderator of the page threatened to delete all of the posts. The result? Massive outrage over Nestlé’s censorship. And that eventually led to an apology from the company and a promise not to delete any more posts.
Does the design of your social channel affect your reputation?
Nestlé’s example seemed to culminate in a power struggle between the company and its critics, which the company home-based food business ideas lost, given the questionable legitimacy of censoring messages. In addition to the general lessons about crisis communication that can be learned from this case, the question arises whether companies like Nestlé should change the way their social media channels are set up.
Breakthrough Communications advises companies, following the Nestlé case, to open a separate discussion channel on a specific issue, because that channels the discussion more and at the same time critics feel better heard. But is that the solution? In the research that my colleagues and I conducted , we looked at whether the design of social media channels does indeed influence a company’s reputation.
Allow comments or not?
A first, fundamental question is whether you should allow comments on your social channels at all. india number list Would it not have been better for Nestlé, for example, if they had not allowed comments at all? That seems unlikely. The whole point of social media is to engage in a dialogue with stakeholders, and by not allowing comments, such a dialogue is made very difficult.
Critics will then find other channels, and perhaps also take the company’s lack of transparency this function is linked to your phone as an additional point of criticism. Our research supports this idea . We showed people a social media post from a fictitious company that sells bottled water (such as Nestlé). The post explained how the company ensures that there are no water shortages in the regions where it sources its water. See the screenshot below.