Nestle Aus manager calls critics irrational, biased

Complete with the infantilising headline we’ve come to expect from Fairfax media, Asher Moses has written up the ongoing #nestlefamily incident:

“Mummy bloggers spit the dummy over Nestle’s spoilt milk”

First, Nestlé hung its bloggers out to dry, leaving them to deal – very, very badly – with the PR disaster they co-created. Nestlé then changed its tune and decided to join twitter. Having invited questions on twitter and claimed to be conducting an open session, ignored questions, pointed to advertising material as “answers”, and lied, @nestlefamily has just pulled out and decided that they’d no longer like to receive public questions at all. They now request that people email them.

From the Moses article:

Seeking to turn the tide of public opinion in its favour and save a brand that has been savaged by the power of social media activism, the company invited 20 of the most influential parenting bloggers to its US headquarters for a two-day all-expenses-paid meeting with Nestle’s chief executive officer.

The event, putting Nestle’s side of the story, ran from September 30 until October 1 and the company even sent free steaks to the women’s homes, purportedly to feed the men of the house while the mummy bloggers were on the Nestle junket.

The bloggers were expected to write – presumably positive – posts from the event and Nestle set up a Twitter tag, “#nestlefamily”, to aggregate their tweets. But as soon as the anti-Nestle activists discovered the tag, they stormed Twitter and the blogs with vitriol, overriding Nestle’s attempt to massage the message. [...]

Responding to the #nestlefamily Twitter storm, Nestle Australia’s corporate affairs manager, Fran Hernon, said the reactions were biased and “predictable”.

“This just goes to show that the blogosphere is a tough place to try to have a rational argument!,” she wrote in an emailed statement.

“The event at Nestle USA was held to introduce our company to a number of bloggers. It was very successful, which of course absolutely infuriated the small, biased, vocal group whose anti-Nestle opinions are so entrenched that no matter what we do, they will twist it to present us in the worst possible light.”

You wish, Ms Hernon, you wish. How about you drop the disrespect and join in the rational discussion by answering – directly and without any obfuscation, evasion, or spin – the questions posed by PhD In Parenting here?

“Follow-up questions for Nestle”

Meanwhile, if you’re not boycotting Nestlé already, how about joining in That Danielle and Blacktating’s #BooNestle Nestlé free week at the end of October? Here is a list of Australian brands to boycott.

[image is from Baby Milk Action. Description: In a parody of a Nestle logo, a vulture sits on a nest. The logo is in the Nestlé style, but reads "Nasty".]

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