Web 2.0 Case Study Overview - Greenpeace versus Nestlé (2010)

On March 17, 2010 Greenpeace launched an online campaign against Nestlé using multiple social media channels. The first phase began with the publishing of a 13-page report called ‘Caught Red-handed: How Nestlé's Use of Palm Oil is Having a Devastating Impact on Rainforest, The Climate and Orang-utans’. It outlined the following two key demands:

1.   STOP THE PROBLEM: NO MORE TRADE WITH THE SINAR MAS GROUP a.   Stop trading with companies within their Sinar Mas group. This includes Golden Agri Resources and its subsidiaries, as well as Sinar Mas Forestry and Asia Pulp & Paper (APP) b.   Stop buying Sinar Mas palm oil and pulp products from third-party suppliers 2.   START THE SOLUTION: SUPPORT ZERO DEFORESTATION a.   Engage with the Indonesian government and industry to deliver a moratorium on forest clearance and peat land protection.

Source: Caught Red-handed: How Nestlé’s Use of Palm Oil is Having a Devastating Impact on Rainforest, The Climate and Orang-utans

This report was published on Greenpeace’s main website, urging its supporters to share the report via social network channels such as Twitter and Facebook and asking them to ‘Tell Nestlé to give orangutans and rainforests a real break’. The report’s release was simultaneously supported by a social media campaign aimed at popular Nestlé brand Kit Kat. The dedicate campaign website contained the modified Kit Kat logo (“Killer”), a call to action (“Ask Nestlé to give rainforests a break”) and readymade letters with a call to boycott Nestlé products over the coming Easter period, an orangutan becoming the main face of the campaign. Greenpeace then posted a spoof KitKat ad, the ‘Have a break’ video, on popular video sharing site, YouTube.  Only a few hours after the online video was posted on YouTube, Nestlé demanded the video be taken down due to breach of copyright. YouTube removed it but this did not stop it from being seen by thousands.  After thirty hours the total number of views on the different versions of the video was over 180,000. As a result, the video went viral. Many web users re-posted the clip to YouTube and other destinations on the Internet, resulting in over 300,000 views in a day (Armstrong, 2010).  On 19 March, Greenpeace posted the video on an alternative sharing site, Vimeo and turned to social media such as Twitter, to announce the video’s disappearance. On 20 March, Greenpeace created another microsite (or landing page) in response to Nestlé’s actions stating “Nestlé don’t want you to see the video above because they complained to YouTube that we were infringing their copyright. YouTube removed the video but now we’d like to offer it to you, as a gift” and urged their supporters to download the video and post it on their favourite video sharing site (Douglas, 2010). It also contained a ready made e-letter to the CEO of Nestlé which was another call to action available to their supporters. Greenpeace encouraged their supporters to change their Facebook profile photos to anti-Nestlé slogans that often incorporated one or more of the company’s food logos and post messages of protests on the official Nestlé Facebook Fan Page. Within a matter of days, Nestlé’s Facebook Fan Page was essentially hijacked by activists and supporters protesting Nestlé’s use of palm oil and its associated destruction of the rainforest.  The page was inundated with a range of different messages that were mostly negative and some even bordering on abusive. By March 20, the issue had gone mainstream with reports in major news media outlets such as BBC and CNN. Much was made of Nestlé’s handling of the crisis, particularly the way the Nestlé Facebook Fan Page moderators were responding directly to the protestors on its page. On 17 May 2010, exactly two months after the campaign started, Greenpeace declared victory when Nestlé announced it would stop using all products that come from rainforest destruction.

Web 1.0 Case Study Overview - Piracy Advocacy Groups versus Intel (1999)

On 20 January 1999 Intel, a leading manufacturer in the computer processor industry, announced that it was planning to include a unique Processor Serial Number (PSN) in its new generation Pentium III computer chips. This announcement caused a stir amongst privacy watchdog groups as they believed that providing a unique PSN would significantly damage consumer privacy. They claimed that the PSN could facilitate information gathering about Internet users on a large scale with web sites able to collect these unique identifying numbers from visitors and keep a record of pages viewed, purchases made and any other data submitted. The site could then sell this information with questions around whether electronic dossiers could be compiled and used by corporate or government information-gathers alike. As one of the privacy group leaders said “The PSN is the greatest threat to the privacy of the American consumer since the social security number” (Kornblum in Leizerov, 2000). Using their existing websites to generate awareness amongst local and international media, these internet savvy tech-lobbyists mounted pressure on Intel resulting in an announcement that Intel would now modify the PSN to allow users control over its activation by creating a software patch. However, the privacy groups were not satisfied and despite meeting with Intel officials and in January 1999, three groups; Electronic Privacy Information Centre (EPIC), Junkbusters Inc. and Privacy International (PI) joined together and declared a boycott on Intel until the PSN was completely disabled and subsequently mounted a massive online protest. A central, standalone website was created to headquarter their campaign and contained links to news, media reports, question and answers, links to more information, along with other campaign related information. It also contained several ways for supporters to take action, making use of new tools and technologies that were now available thanks to the Internet that had not existed before, such as the ability to download graphics and text, and a link to a downloadable copy of campaign flyers that the public was encouraged to print out and distribute. In addition, the public was urged to put a text line referring to Intel’s misuse of power in the signature bloc of their emails and to write to leading PC makers to let them know that their computers would not be bought if they had the PSN in them. In April 2000, 16 months after the start of the campaign, Intel declared that it would stop using PSN in its next generation of computer processors (Kannelos in Leizerov 2000)