Killer KitKats

This week saw two interesting social media ‘fails’. First we had Nestlé’s reaction to a greenpeace video about their use of palm oil in KitKat.  The increasing use of Palm oil has resulted in devastating destruction of rainforests and peatlands to create vast monoculture plantations. It’s a classic ecowarriors versus evil-corporation style campaign which is gaining a lot of support. Greenpeace’s opening shot is here:

I must admit, it’s a quite horrible shock advert in the usual Greenpeace style – Nestlé’s response was to get the video taken down from YouTube citing infringement of their trademarked logo.  Almost since the beginning of YouTube what usually happens when a video is taken offline,  a copy will be almost immediately uploaded again;  and Greenpeace of course used this response to generate support for their campaign, and even made the original available for supporters to upload using their own accounts.

The effect was immediate with tweets and facebook updates being bound around mentioning Nestlé’s censorship tactics – a suitably rebellious message which is popular for users of social media to repeat and pass on.

This is a classic example of the ‘Streisand effect ‘ in which an attempt to censor or remove a piece of information from the public domain has the unintended consequence of generating more publicity than if it had just been left online.

Nestlé didn’t stop there however: inevitably as their Facebook page became the source of comments and questions about their use of Palm oil, Nestlé instead responded angrily to the use of their logo as an avatar image, again resulting in yet another deluge of tweets and status updates.

The end result was Greenpeace claiming the upper hand, and Nestlé looking out of step with the campaigners and their customers.

#CashGordon – whose fail?

The other social media ‘fail’ of the past week has been the Conservative website launched to promote the message that Gordon Brown is supported by money for the Unite Union – currently supporting a strike by British Airways workers that has divided opinion. Interestingly the CashGordon  site features an unmoderated twitter stream repeating every tweet with the #cashgordon hashtag. It’s a particularly old school concept which dates from when twitter was a relatively new phenomenon, and having anyone tweet about your site was quite exciting.

The more left wing tweeters have jumped on this hashtag with a stream of abuse – many of which are too rude to put here, but which include things like:

@fusi_loving the EPIC FAIL that is #cashgordon – they cant even get a twitter feed right, what are they gonna do with the economy? lol. #toryfail

and

@lordbonkers Write something rude about the Tories, mark it#cashgordon and they post it on their own campaign site for youhttp://cash-gordon.com/

and the rather damming:

@psbook New post –> Tory ‘Cash Gordon’ campaign designed by US anti-healthcare lobbyist http://is.gd/aSFIF #cashgordon

Interestingly however the very presence of the website, and the numerous comments on the #cashgordon hashtag has had the unintended consequence of bringing the whole campaign to the attention of a much wider audience (at time of writing #cashgordon is trending in the top ten of the UK) which itself is being claimed as a success.

Update: I’ll see if I can tally up the tweets to see who can claim victory on this one

Another Update: nope, quite clear epic fail

Epic fail

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWCvB7_hl6s

Last year a campaigner based in Bangladesh contacted me on facebook in regard to a proposed open cast mine in Phulbari, Bangladesh. A UK based company GCM were attempting to get permission to build a mine that would displace 30,000 people and destroy the water supply of a further million.

I was able to very rapidly put together a video, based on footage of GCM’s offices, stock footage of an open cast coal mine and a video that had been made by the campaigners in Bangladesh. The original Bangladesh video titled ‘the blood soaked banner of Phulbari’ and was too long for the standard youtube format of less than 10 minutes, so by re-cutting highlights from this film with WDM’s material made the video more suitable for our audience.

We ran a series of online actions using the video and were successful in getting Barclays Bank to sell their shares in the project, and Gareth Thomas (minister at BERR and DFID) withdraw UK government support for the project. This was the most popular online action WDM has ever carried out.

I think the video would have been improved with footage of the campaigner doing a piece to camera – by experimenting with different video formats I’ve found that an appeal made directly to the viewer makes for the most effective response rate to an appeal or campaign ask.

2) Question to Gordon Brown

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXl_ydgTKrc

This is a very simple video shot on a tiny video camera with a question to Gordon Brown asking what he was doing to fight poverty at an upcoming G20 conference. At the time Downing Street were using YouTube for people to submit questions, with a vote to decide on the videos for Gordon Brown to answer. By emailing our supporters the voting link for our video we were able to ‘game’ the vote in our favour, and you can see in the responses to this video a direct video message from Gordon Brown.

Emailing our supporters with an alternate action to the normal petitions or email actions helped improve the response rate, and being able to reply to our supporters with a direct response from the Prime Minister proved a popular way of promoting WDM as an organisation having an impact on politics in the UK.

If I was to do something like this again I think the video would have sounded better comming from a supporter or local WDM group member as opposed to staff, I think also the sound would have been greatly impoved with a better camera / microphone setup.