Nestle is currently fighting a losing battle on its Facebook Fan Page

What they should do next?

For Nestle right now, there are 3 x steps they need to take:

• Get personal. Posting as “Nestle” is a big mistake: people respond to people, and Facebook is after all a social network. Get a senior Nestle team member –with their real profile and photo - engaged NOW in answering questions. This will make a huge difference to the timbre of debate and authenticity of dealing with this.

• Make sure that they’re responding privately and publicly across all platforms – so if the same debate is kicking off on YouTube, make sure a Nestle person who understands YouTube with their profile is there to respond on YouTube, ditto via Twitter, and so on.

• Use it as an opportunity: get a real person at Nestle as above to find out exactly what the issue is, the depth of feeling, and be open and honest. Could Nestle actually take a serious look at the issues raised? Ask these people if they care about this issue, could Nestle create a virtual working group and invite these people together virtually to genuinely address this issue and discuss it, with Nestle responding to ideas and crowd sourcing possible responses / solutions.

Nestle – with Fairtrade for example – has proven it can listen and act responsibly – do that now, do it openly.

In terms of other brands watching and cringing, there are a couple of key take aways from this:

• Have a strategy in place. The fact that Nestle clearly didn’t have a strategy in place re logos / deleting posts etc ( or if they did, it was the wrong one ) is the first mistake. Brands – no matter how big or small – have to be prepared for this “Black Swan” moment, as Habitat and Paperchase have recently discovered..

• This means having an active listening plan in place so that brands can track buzz / negative sentiment and react faster.

• Secondly it’s about having the right guidelines in place: Be polite, be responsive understand that this is ‘not your space, its theirs’ (so a God-like editing of posts / set of 10 Commandments like ‘thou shalt not alter our logo’ are not going to work ).

• Thirdly, brands have to have an escalation policy in place – who gets involved if a death threat is posted to the CEO? Or something like this kicks off? All of these things need to be in place now, not after the horse has bolted. The best way is having a social media working group with heads of sales / HR / CRM / PR / comms etc that meet for an hour a month in order to plan for this type of eventuality.

The “mummies on the bus go chatter, chatter, chatter” sound familiar?

Research released from Neilsen in the UK shows that women (over 35) are the fastest growing demongraphic on sites like Twitter and MySpace as reported by The Times:

Figures gathered for The Times by Nielsen, the market research firm, show that just over half of all social-networking users in the UK are women. But almost 59 per cent of females “consume the content” of these sites — a jump of almost 10 per cent since last year.

Not surprising really is it? Social networks are merely just another social arena, so it was only time before women caught up with the latest place to have a good chat and gossip.

But what does this mean from a marketing and corporate communication perspective?

Mommy Bloggers have long been on the radar as Darren Rowse (@problogger) wrote some time ago about Five Reasons why Mom Blogs are the Blogs to watch.

Corporates must be careful though: Nestle recently tapped into this influential group of women only to have it backfire on them according to an article in The Age last week.