Nestle has found itself mired in a social media controversy after it had a Greenpeace video pulled down from YouTube last week.

The video featured allegations within a Greenpeace report that Nestle is supporting the destruction of the Indonesian rainforest by purchasing palm oil from companies that are planting palm oil plants. Nestle uses palm oil in products such as popular candy bars such as Kit Kat, Rolo, Butterfinger and Coffee Crisp.

YouTube pulled down the video but Greenpeace countered by putting it on Vimeo where the video (embedded below) has now had more than 242,000 views.

While there has been lots of activity on Twitter, Facebook and the mainstream media, Nestle’s reputation does not appear to have taken a major hit.

Using Sysomos MAP, we looked at sentiment Nestle within the blogosphere before and after Greenpeace issued its report about Nestle’s use of Indonesian palm oil suppliers.

Before the report was published on March 17, sentiment for “Nestle” was 42% positive and 16% negative. Since then, sentiment has changed to 36% positive and 21% negative.

We also used MAP to look at social media activity since March 17 using the search query: “nestle” AND (“palm oil” OR “kit kat” OR greenpeace OR “sinar mas” OR “rain forest”).

Overall, there were 887 blog posts, 261 news articles and 7,468 tweets. Sentiment was 19% positive, 45% neutral and 36% negative.

Within the BuzzGraph, the most active keyword was “Nestle” with strong links to “rain forest”, “kit kat” and “orangutan”, which live in the Indonesian rain forests.

Here’s the video created by Greenpeace. (Note: It is fairly graphic.)

Have a break? from Greenpeace UK on Vimeo.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 22nd, 2010 at 10:30 am and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.