March 23rd, 2010

Power to the Stakeholders – Nestle, Greenpeace and Facebook

Social Media Continues to Reshape Stakeholder Relations

By Beth Bengtson

It’s clear that the rise of social media is transforming the relationship between companies and stakeholders. Facebook, Twitter and other social media tools are filling a void for stakeholders who crave authentic, two-way dialogue.

But these new channels of communication can also reveal the challenges companies face when social justice activists criticize a company, its products and/or practices. Tagged “digital activism,” these stakeholders have used YouTube and websites to launch massive campaigns against companies.

Now digital activists are flooding Facebook pages, which has been a tremendous tool for stakeholder engagement, to criticize corporate practices – the most recent being consumer products giant Nestle. As CNET reports http://bit.ly/9Cj01K, activists led by Greenpeace have “infiltrated” Nestle’s Facebook page to pressure the company to abandon getting palm oil from unsustainable sources.

Greenpeace has been down this road before. As I discussed in a research paper last fall Social Media Advances the Sustainability Dialogue, Greenpeace was successful in getting Apple to reduce its use of toxic chemicals while another campaign forced Unilever to source palm oil from suppliers who don’t deforest. In those prior campaigns, though, Greenpeace used blogs, YouTube and websites to build pressure against Apple and Unilever.

With Facebook, the pressure is immediate and intense. As with Apple or Unilever, if Nestle had joined or initiated the dialogue earlier, the impact might have been mitigated. Perhaps. In the meantime, the key takeaways for other companies to consider include:

• Understanding that stakeholder engagement is becoming increasingly important in this new more engaged world
• Having an engagement plan in place is critical to know how to respond when items like these come up
• Realizing that having a CSR report as the main sustainability communications tool is not enough and that more people within the company need to be empowered on this topic

To see related previous posts on this topic….

CSR is Inside Baseball – Take the Quiz

Social Media for Sustainability

Social Media Advances the Sustainability Dialogue

And most of all, let us know your thoughts on this topic.