The crisis earlier this year was prompted when a Greenpeace video highlighted Nestlé’s use of palm oil grown on former rainforest land in South-East Asia and linked the iconic Kit-Kat with the deaths of orangutans, which are an endangered species. Nestlé sought to ban the video and successfully removed it from YouTube, though not Vimeo. The Nestlé Facebook page was inundated with protests and criticism as a result.
The Nestlé page has 109,502 fans but many of them seem to have joined in order to leave critical comments about issues such as palm oil or baby formula, such as the ones below. Nestlé is such a consumer-facing company that it’s probably right not to retreat from social media – but I can’t say I envy the poor PR flacks who have to run this page.
The room they worked in measured about 30 feet by 30 feet and is normally used for training sessions. BP’s crisis unit had commandeered it and renamed it the “intervention room” soon after the leak began. Cables wrapped in yellow tape with the word “warning” written on it, snaked from the ceiling to the cheap, white laminated tables, which were crammed with laptops. Maps of the Gulf and diagrams of the equipment on the seabed covered the thin walls.
Next door, in an almost identical space called the “containment room”, a separate group of engineers worked on strategies to capture the oil that had already leaked.
The team in the intervention room pored over the results of tests to see if the well could take the pressure. The mood was “intense”, BP’s director for the Americas Bob Dudley told Reuters in the narrow, artificially-lit corridor outside the room during a break in deliberations. “It’s kind of like NASA and the Apollo 13 mission in there.”
The uber-calm Dudley isn’t normally given to hyperbole. He was formerly the head of TNK-BP, the British firm’s joint venture with a group of Russian oligarchs, until the billionaires turned hostile and Dudley was forced to flee the country. He talks about that experience with the emotion of an oil man discussing his wife’s choice of make-up. In Houston that afternoon, though, there was a flicker of tension in his eyes.
“It’s pretty dramatic,” he said.
BP CEO Tony Hayward (L) speaks with Reuters journalist Tom Bergin (R) aboard the Discover Enterprise drill ship in the Gulf of Mexico, 55 miles (89 km) south of Venice, Louisiana May 28, 2010. Credit: REUTERS/Sean Gardner
This story is a living, breathing “crisis communications” case study that will be a lesson for students and practioners for years to come, just as Love Canal did in the 1970’s.
