Facebook users last week witnessed a real-time, social media centered public bludgeoning of a multinational corporation that will serve as a case study in social media ineptness for years.

Although most of the public missed the online contretemps, last week Nestle Corporation’s Facebook Fan Page was essentially hijacked by Greenpeace activists and supporters protesting Nestle’s use of palm oil and its associated destruction of the rainforest.

Techguerilla provides a handy timeline detailing the escalation of hostilities between Greenpeace activists and Nestle’s Facebook administrator that ultimately degraded into social media warfare.

What lessons can your business learn from Nestle’s Facebook surrender?

You should expect organized attacks from your critics on your social media platforms so you need to prepare your crisis response in advance. Although you might think that you own your Facebook page or Twitter account and hashtag, the community actually has the power to dictate the content of conversations revolving around your brand.  What you can control is your response and your message. You should have a crisis response team identified and prepared to respond to likely attacks before they ever happen. You know where your weaknesses are, and so do your critics, so plan for the worst.

You may not be able to convert the mob, but you can rally your supporters. Although the Greenpeace activists essentially hijacked Nestle’s corporate Fan Page, Nestle still had the capacity to respond and plead their case to their true fans. While they did post a link to a detailed and persuasive written corporate response, it lacked the impact of the Greenpeace videos and unrelenting attacks. Large corporations don’t have to respond with lawyer approved communications, they elect to. And when they do, they don’t look social or engaging, they look monolithic and impersonal. If you elect to participate on social media platforms, you need a social strategy and trained social media participants.

Utilize the power of the social medium to engage socially. Nestle never put a human face on their corporate response. Nobody knows who the inept Facebook administrator was, they had no identified corporate employees respond and they failed utterly in dealing with angry posters, fostering relationships with supportive advocates or engaging their critics.

What could Nestle have done differently, acknowledging that they didn’t have a crisis plan in place, once the attack began?

1. Respond immediately and cordially. Nestle’s lack of an experienced community manager may have precipitated this entire battle. Their early combative tone and snarky responses fueled anger on their Facebook page and enabled the conflict to attain viral status.
2. Convene an internal crisis response team to review the attack and anticipate their next move. Once the conflagration started, Nestle should have assembled a response team of social media managers, corporate communications and marketing executives to strategize their response and look ahead to anticipate their critics’ likely next step.
3. Shift their focus to engaging the attackers and trying to find common ground for resolution (Olivier Blanchard makes an excellent case for reaching out to Greenpeace rather than combatting them). Nestle’s Facebook page isn’t a battlefield, and they can’t vanquish their foes. Their best course of action isn’t direct and repeated confrontation, but negotiation and appeasement. Had they reached out to Greenpeace to discuss how they could work together to solve the environmental problems they could have mitigated much of the continued anger. Neither side benefits from continued digital warfare, so find a way to reach accommodation.
4. Determine the appropriate message and medium for continued conversation. Nestle responded to their critics with brief statements and a link to a more detailed corporate response. They never leveraged the power of the visual medium to communicate their position. This wasn’t a time for press releases.
5. Prepare video responses to put a human face on the issue and to communicate their corporate commitment as concerned employees, not a compassionless multi-national corporation. Take a page out of Toyota’s response to potentially life-threatening concerns with their cars and respond with video. Toyota put up a series of videos dealing head on with the issues being covered in the media, with corporate spokespeople standing up to defend their position and address specific concerns. Additionally, they recruited independent safety experts and engineers as supporters. Nestle had the same opportunity to respond and defend their position and demonstrate to their fans that they care about the accusations and take seriously their role as environmental stewards. They had a strong case to make, but they never made it effectively.