This icon of chocolate goodness seems harmless. Greenpeace, however, has pressured Nestlé to stop using palm oil in its products, citing deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions and endangered species loss.

They placed a video on YouTube connecting dead Indonesian orang-utan fingers with Nestlé’s famous KitKats chocolate finger confectionary. Nestlé lobbied to have the video removed, citing copyright infringement. Naturally the video popped up all over the web. Greenpeace’s supporters also attacked Nestlé’s Facebook fan page. They used anti-Nestlé slogans instead of profile pictures – distorting the Nestlé “KitKat” logo into Nestlé “Killer”.

Nestlé threatened to delete comments from people who misused their brand. The company’s forum moderator insulted the company’s attackers. Nestlé was portrayed as a company that wanted to stifle criticism – not defend its trademarks.

Ultimately, they apologized for being rude, and stopped deleting posts. But the damage had been done. Nestlé didn’t seem to have a plan when its Facebook channel came under assault. On the upside, they have become a cautionary tale for the thousands of brands on Facebook.

Now if it will please the jury, may I present defence exhibit B – a jar of vegemite.

Vegemite is a pungent dark-brown yeast-extract that antipodeans spread on their toast.  To launch a new cheese flavoured spread, manufacturer Kraft created a public naming competition, subsequently putting the nameless product on shelves. Kraft received 48,000 entries and ultimately selected “iSnack 2.0” as the winner.

This name was met with almost universal condemnation. Thousands of comments flew across Twitter. 35 Facebook pages and 161 Facebook groups were created to condemn the iSnack 2.0 name. A website, “Names That Are Better Than iSnack 2.0”, sprang up. One commentator even suggested that person who had submitted the winning name be tarred with Vegemite and forced to run naked through Sydney “as retribution for his cultural crime.”

Within 72 hours, Kraft decided the i-Snack 2.0 name wasn’t worth defending. A subsequent poll chose Vegemite “CheesyBite” as the preferred name. However sales of iSnack 2.0 rose 47 percent during its controversial first two weeks, not affecting sales of original Vegemite. Marketing stunt or blunder? I guess the lines between genius and madness are blurred.

So, is social media friend or foe?  Does it even matter? In both cases, social channels were certainly used to attack brands. These channels don’t exist because marketers want them to. They exist because the mob wants them to. The real question, members of the jury, is what roles are you and your company playing in social media channels?

While GM likely planned ahead to monitor the flurry of discussion in social media to have a pulse on brand sentiment about this change in leadership and may have even outlined their approach to respond or not respond to top-tier business blogs or comments on the Fast Lane blog, it’s unlikely that they anticipated that a family member’s reaction would captivate social media users and blog headlines. Even more troubling is that this post creates a potential perception problem by suggesting that GM was not being truthful when it announced the resignation and instead fired Henderson after only an eight-month tenure.

Beyond being a great case study for making sure that social media is part of your crisis communications planning process, the incident also underscores the need for a systematic approach to evaluating how your situation will play out, what social media flare ups could occur and the appropriate response.

A useful process that comes to mind here is mind mapping. According to Wikipedia, a mind map is a “diagram used to represent ideas, tasks or other items linked to and arranged around a central keyword or situation. Mind maps are used to generate, visualize, structure and classify ideas, and aid in problem solving or decision making. Mindjet, a Text 100 client, makes excellent tools for mind mapping and visual thinking.

By creating a mind map for your crisis communications situation, you can easily evaluate the divergent paths social media could take. For example, the ROUGH start to a mind map for a plant closing could look like this (click on image for a larger view):

By visualizing the crisis, the stakeholders impacted, the initial social media reaction, your strategy and the potential reaction to your response, it’s easy to see where there might be gaps that need to be better addressed.

I’d love your thoughts on this. Do you incorporate social media strategy as part of your crisis communications plans? If so, what is your process? What tools have you found helpful?

That aside, much of the conversations on Twitter and blogs are on the failure of GM to respond to Sarah Henderson’s post.  The question is should they? Will this post really have an effect on the brand reputation and purchasing decisions of consumers like you or I to buy a GM car? Perhaps a few people, close friends of Sarah and the family that naturally see the events as unfair – Hey! if anyone in my family ever gets fired, my natural tendency will be to protect and stand by the ones I love, I just don’t think I would do it over Facebook, but that is me.  Sarah did, and that raises questions to how a company such as GM, with significant challenges ahead, should react to this type of post/situation.

Should GM address Sarah? Or should the company let it go and let the noise diminish overtime?  Is a statement about family members being off limits the right statement? And was it really the daughter of Fritz Henderson the person who posted the Facebook update? Which brings a whole other set of questions as to validity, credibility and influence of social media platforms, but I will leave that for another post…

Yes, it brings up questions about the decisions made at GM and it brings about important issues as to how to best deal with disagreements that were not intended to become public in the way they have. I say focus on the important stuff; after all there have and will always be disagreements, retractors and angry people. The difference now is that those have a louder voice that can travel fast and through many vehicles, but do they have more influence as they would’ve have otherwise? i.e. at the lunch cafeteria in school?  How would you have responded?

What I found particularly impressive was that this team from a rural area in Clarence, NY, who had never experienced a disaster of this magnitude and found themselves on the front line of a national crisis, seamlessly lead a swift and efficient response that comms teams and experienced crisis professionals across the country are now learning from. By quickly establishing their goals (below) and roles and responsibilities, anticipating the questions to come each day and communicating in one clear voice through their strategic tactics (below), they’ve become an impressive crisis comms example. Need a quick proof point about their effectiveness? The first official press conference about the crash happened within one hour. Contrast this with the rampage at the American Civic Center in Binghamton, NY, where the first official press conference was held 8 hours after the crisis.

But the session did leave me with one lingering question: Was there a role for social media in the response that was overlooked? Social media isn’t always the answer and shouldn’t be a strategy by itself. Yet there are some clear ways that social media could have support and aligned with the crisis comms goals. Below I’ve broken out each goal, the tactic the response team deployed and a potential social media idea:

I welcome your thoughts. Would social media have strengthened or fragmented the response? Have you used social media as part of your response to a crisis?

But the most important thing about this panel? That it was on the agenda at all.

Let me explain.

SC World Congress was billed as “the only dedicated IT security event focused on providing the latest solutions and inside information to help IT & data security professionals do their jobs better.”  Naturally, the majority of the sessions focused on topics that you’d expect to be of interest to “IT & data security professionals,” including “PCI: More Data=More Regulation…Finally,” “Global Data Threats,” “IT Security Governance,” and many more along those lines.

So when I was approached to participate in a panel at SC World Congress on how to handle communications around a breach, I was thrilled. Thrilled because the inclusion of a PR session at a security event reflects a growing awareness among the security industry that smart, effective comms around a breach is one of the most important considerations when the inevitable happens. It also points to an increasing appreciation for breach comms as a key responsibility of the CSO/CISO.

(On a more personal note, this marks my third such engagement this year, and since us PR folk all know that three constitutes a trend, we can officially conclude that the security industry “gets it.”  Right?!)

Equally thrilling is that I had the honor of talking about data breach PR with Rich Baich, who had the tough job of being CISO at ChoicePoint in 2005 when it was forced to deal with a well-publicized “incident.”  Baich weathered that storm nicely and now dedicates a fair amount of time, both in his professional capacity as principal at Deloitte and on the speaking circuit, to sharing best practices with other security professionals to help them deal with similar situations.

Dan Kaplan moderated what I thought was a really good, interactive conversation.  We touched upon a lot: why breach PR is important, how to prepare for a breach, elements of a breach comms plan, breach notification law, the role of the CISO during this time, etc.

Stay tuned for a video with highlights from the panel…

As a sidenote, hats off to SC Magazine for putting on a solid event.  It seemed like everything was conspiring against the conference, including all of the challenges associated with introducing an event at a time when most conference managers are circling their wagons and scaling back.  Add to that an economy that’s all but obliterating travel budgets for attendees and event budgets for exhibitors… and oh, let’s throw in some rainy weather too.

But Illena Armstrong and the crew at SC Mag pulled it off.  Through some very unscientific polling (over cocktails and post-panel chitchat), I found that exhibitors were pleased with the quality of attendees (C-level, decision-makers), and that attendees enjoyed the breadth and quality of sessions.

If you have thoughts on SC World Congress or your own story about breach PR, I invite you to join the discussion. We’d love to hear your thoughts.