Greenpeace drops into Nestle shareholder meeting, Facebook comments not enough

After a sustained Social Media campaign regarding Nestle’s palm oil sourcing in its products, Greenpeace stepped out of purely digital spaceand and actually disrupted a shareholder meeting in ‘the real world.’(video)

Nestle shareholders witnessed a Greenpeace activist rappelling into the meeting from the roof and raising the issues that have been all over Facebook for the last month.

This campaign has been a massive Social Media effort that sparked 200,000 emails and 1.3 million video views. But Social Media pressure may not be the most effective thing when trying to reach a very specific, influential, and relatively small group of people such as key shareholders.

Nestle issued a sustainability approach statement addressing the raised controversy several days prior to the shareholder meeting, and the issue now seems to be about understanding public opinion, perceived urgency and timing.

Even though not everyone is willing to make a splash like Greenpeace (and get arrested), the organisation seems to have mastered the art of applying pressure on corporations and creating synergy between the real world and digital world to address different audiences.

This report was edited for clarity on July 29. 2015 at the author’s request.