Greenpeace drops into Nestle shareholder meeting, Facebook comments not enough

April 16, 2010 | Written by Yan Shikhvarger

[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.’

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Tags: Social Media Crisis