We were alerted by Social Radar that chatter volumes around Nestle and Kit-Kat specifically were rising by the minute. When we checked-in we found that the topic of the moment was Palm Oil.

We took a look at the actual chatter volumes for the Nestle company and we were staggered to see the trend below.

It was clear to us that something was going on here so we dug deeper.

Our conclusions were that Greenpeace had staged a video on Vimeo which you can find here and they had also changed their homepage to mimic the logo of the much- loved Kit-Kat chocolate bar.

The discussion had flowed out primarily across Nestles Facebook page and a Nestle employee was deleting Wall Posts at a serious rate.

We then took a look to see how this was effecting the sentiment towards the Kit Kat product and discovered that over the past couple of days the positive sentiment to a much-loved product has been rapidly falling through the floor as they are being associated with destroying rain forests for the plam oil used to create them and also being accused of potentially killing Orang-utans by virtue of this.

Whether true or not we are clearly seeing a hugely negative trend shift for not just Kit-Kat the product but Nestle as a house of brands.

The key here is to identify the influencial persons, engage with them and try to stop the rot from penetrating further into their business by being open and honest and using the social channels to drive back the potentially incorrect debate – that is if it is incorrect of course.