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.
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