April 2010 Archive

[originally published on The Next Web]

After a sustained Social Media campaign of shaming Nestle’s use of controversially sourced palm oil, Greenpeace did the next best thing and crashed (video) the shareholder meeting, this time in ‘the real world.’

Nestle shareholders witnessed a Greenpeace activist rappelling into the meeting from the roof and raising the issues that have been all over Facebook for the last month.

This campaign has been a massive Social Media effort that sparked 200,000 emails and 1.3 million video views. But Social Media pressure may not be the most effective thing when trying to reach a very specific, influential, and relatively small group of people such as key shareholders. Even though not everyone is willing to make a splash like Greenpeace (and get arrested), but they seem to have mastered the art of applying digital and real world pressure on corporations and creating synergy between the two.

Nestle did issue a statement addressing the raised controversy several days prior to the shareholder meeting, but the issue now seems to be about the perceived urgency and timing.

It is difficult to ignore an organization both in the digital realm and ‘the real world.’

Howard Solomon, head of RF West, is an early adopter of the famous iPad! Check out his early review.

[Published on Tech Dork]

I am trying not to be a complete Apple homer here. Sure, I pre-ordered one. Sure I got up early and was the first person in line at Best Buy this morning. Sure, there was no way I wasn’t going to like it. But all that being said, this thing really is spectacular. Not sure where to even start. If I had to explain it in one word it would be – immersive. Regardless the application, you just get sucked into it. The screen and the colors are incredible, web browsing is in a league of itself, the bookstore is terrific. And well, you probably get the point. I’ll go into more details in a later post but bottom line is that the hype is warranted. Only two things that disappoint. One – typing is sub optimal. I’m typing this post on it and it is taking some time. Two – now I feel the need for multitasking. Until that occurs, no way this replaces my laptop for business purposes. I need multiple applications open at a time and that isn’t negotiable. Anyway, if you’re on the fence and can afford one, I say go for it. I don’t think you’ll regret it for a second.

We’ll be closely following his journey with the iPad so stay tuned for more!

[Published on The Next Web]

The Social Media backlash against Nestle’s use of questionably sourced Palm Oil in its products, as raised by Greenpeace, has seemed massive but its true impact is unclear.

Yes it is true that Nestle has been obviously caught off guard, and was slow to respond while its Facebook page was overwhelmed by negative comments.

But is this a real customer crisis that will affect sales or just a spike of negative buzz?

The meaningful answers will come in due time when Nestle releases its financial results. In the meantime, the Social Media monitoring technology firm Crimson Hexagon has just released current social perception data and digital conversation themes surrounding Nestle.

Of the identified categories, there is an obvious negative segment that is quite significant at 30% of the conversation. It is likely that this sentiment and new segment can be directly attributed to this crisis.

But, the segments like ‘Social Media is powerful’ and the ‘Handling of the situation’ are not as significant. These conversation themes are more interested in the social media side of the story, much like this blog post, rather than the customer side which could affect sales and perhaps company reputation. Aggregating the neutral conversation themes comes to approximately 50% of the conversation, and this type of chatter is not likely to scare the company.

Similarly, when Domino’s had their own social media crisis last April due to employees posting their inappropriate product handling exploits on YouTube, sales slid 1%-2% that quarter. Only time will tell if this crisis has similar or any impact on the company, but its reputation has seemed take a slight hit according to Crimson Hexagon’s data.