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Nestlé’s Social Media Evolution: Crisis to Engagement Mastery
Greenpeace released a viral video in 2010 highlighting Nestlé’s use of palm oil derived from unsustainable practices that devastate orangutan habitats. And the company did what any brand in a panic would do. It made a valiant attempt to remove the video. Following this, there was a strong backlash and protests from all social media communities. Nestlé had learned its most important social media lesson, albeit in a difficult way. And the lesson is that open engagement is critical when it comes to social media.
It embraced a new social media strategy based on principles of open engagement and developed a new framework using data and insights gained from social media activities on various platforms. The insights garnered from this framework were to guide Nestlé in all its future campaigns and help build its reputation.
Under the leadership of Pete Blackshaw, Global Head, Digital Marketing and Social Media, Nestlé created the Digital Acceleration Team (DAT). DAT is the digital leadership training program for digital marketing projects at Nestlé. The 12 members of each class are available to work on short-term projects for which the Nestlé units apply. Then they return to their units, bringing with them what Blackshaw calls “digital vitamins.” These “vitamins” are the supplemental expertise that can be used to assist with the digital transformation in the graduate’s home unit.
In this post, we’ll look at how Nestlé uses business dashboards to visualize data for social media monitoring and engagement.
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A typical DAT center has rows upon rows of flat-panel screens mounted on the walls for easy scanning of data. This process can be done across several desktops, glass walls, a hushed, generally high-tech atmosphere, and streams of live data visualized for rapid analysis.
On a typical day, the team monitors millions of posts each day on topics ranging from the latest cute dog photo on the Purina pet food website to who was drinking Nescafe to real-time recipe tweets.
The team monitors metrics like volume of conversations, sentiment level and benchmarks it against other players by making effective use of data viz.
They also spend time listening and figuring out when and where to engage and how to communicate with consumers in the right context.
The center’s screens are set up to spot trouble. “When there are a high number of comments,” Blackshaw adds, “it alerts you that you need to engage.” That can mean a real-time online response from a team member. “If there is a negative issue emerging, it turns red.”
Through such effective social media engagement with the help of real-time data visualization, Nestlé climbed to the 12th spot from 16th in 2011 in the Reputation Institute’s index of the world’s most reputable companies. In 2013, Nestlé joined the Forbes Top 10 List of The World’s Most Reputable Companies.