Community is queen in social media while Content is King. This statement rang more clearly earlier today when I attended the first Mindspeak in 2012 orginased by Aly-Khan Satchu. Today’s guest was Pierre Trouilhat – CEO & Regional Head Nestle Equatorial African region. The speaker was well prepared with facts about his company and having work at Nestle for 31 years, he knew his stuff.

What struck me as strange though was a question on Chocolate slavery, which the CEO was asked to clarify the company’s positionon the issue and he claim he did not know about the documentary running on CNN on this issue. Worse still, Ivory Coast one of the countries feautured in the documentary, is responsible for supplying 35% of the world’s cocoa which is evidently  Nestle’s main raw material is in the CEO’s backyard. Mr. CEO someone in your Corporate Affairs should be knee deep in this, dont you think?

Before I move away from Mr. Pierre’s case, why is there no Kenyan in the senior  management team you paraded before us today. Is the Ghanian exec supposed to be a consolation price for Africa. Surely Nestle can do better. Yeah I know you mentioned a limited resource pool as one of the business challenges but is it this bad that no one locally qualifies to hold a top office in Nestle. But wait a minute you mentioned Nestle is not the best paying employer, so is it possible to then say you are in a talent pool crisis because you cannot attract good talent since your pay is cheap.

Back to Community is Queen in Social Media…

During Mindspeak twitter was busy with attendees posting updates on Twitter . With a room filled to capacity, am talking  about 100 plus group of tech savvy and socially engaged crowd, it is no wonder I saw some people who went not in attendance complain that there was too much #Mindspeak in twitter. This is communities are made of.

Think about as we sat in that room, no matter our views on what the CEO was sharing or not sharing, we were for a moment there ambassadors for the Nestle brand. As far as hush tags go #Nestle was high on the list this morning. But how did the company capitalize on all this publicity? Going forward how will the talk the CEO gave some tangible ROI that can be attribute to him and his top brass spending a whole Saturday Morning at Intercontinental Hotel?

This was a perfect opportunity for Nestle to create a community of willing ambassadors around it’s brand. Nestle would have invited the #Mindspeak community to engage with them on their own platform – a corporate blog. This  would have tapped in on the traffic from twitter to Nestle’s corporate site.

On this platform, any questions asked during the presentation would be posted and their answers too, so that those wanted more information can engage with the company. In addition the blog can serve as an engagement tool with the customers of Nestle.

Brands should be able to build communities around themselves to only promote their products, but also feed customer feedback which is vital in improving the brand or customer service. Remember Community is Queen in Social media.

 

 

 

 

 

Written by: 

Pauline is the CEO at Allen Cole, also consults for iWork and Elite Writers Hub. She works with small and medium size organizations to increase their visibility online through corporate blogging, content creation, website development and social media engagement.