Both Shell and Nestle have succumbed to Trevor Mallard sized social media disasters. One wonders how he finds the time for all this consulting what with transporting himself between parliament, Wainuiomata and now Invercargill.
Shell’s brand has been hijacked in what marketing experts say is a “social media oil spill” and a “coordinated online assassination of the Shell brand”.
Shell now have the equivalent of a social media oil spill on their hands but one they have no control of.
It’s a fake PR disaster that has snowballed into a very real one for Shell as web users are under the impression that it is an official company campaign.
Nestle’s disaster is much worse as it is self-inflicted:
Nestle has been forced to take down an image from its Kit Kat Facebook fan page, after it emerged that it was similar to an icon used to ward off paedophiles.
The picture of the nut brown-coloured bear was used briefly to promote Kit Kat Bars on the Facebook page of the Nestle-owned chocolate bar. The company said it had no idea that the image matched that of “Pedobear” – considered visual shorthand on the internet for sites posting material with inappropriate overtones towards minors.
“Drum roll please … Kit Kat is on Instagram,” the company wrote above an Instagram photo of the brown bear at a drum set yesterday, with two Kit Kat chocolate bars in its paws in the place of drumsticks.
Nestle Australia & New Zealand confirmed that it had produced the image but denied any knowledge of the paedophile-linked Pedobear.
“We produced this photo – of a real guy in a bear suit – to launch Instagram through our Facebook community,” a spokeswoman for the company said. “The picture is not Pedobear.”
“We had never heard of Pedobear,” she said. “But when the possibility of its similarity to the so-called ‘Pedobear’ was raised with us, we immediately removed it.”
The so-called “mascot of paedophilia” has become an internet meme and shorthand for ‘Stop being creepy about kids.’
