Setting up, maintaining and monitoring your presence in the social media probably sounds a bit like stealing candy from a baby. 
After all, how hard can it be?
But one of the world’s leading confectionery and food firms is discovering – after a five-month controversy – that life for a company on Facebook is not always sweet, and that you can make it infinitely worse by your own actions.
Let me take you back to March of this year, when Greenpeace supporters began to bombard Nestle’s Facebook page with entries demanding to know if the company was sourcing palm oil from endangered rainforests in Indonesia, where the orang-utan is under threat. Many of the writers used altered Nestle logos to make their point. An administrator on the Nestle page told them to, shall we say, take a break from using the firm’s trademarks. And then all hell broke loose. A few more snippy comments from the administrator, combined with the removal of some of the posts, and we had a perfect example of the Streisand Effect (named after the singer, who famously caused herself more trouble by trying to prevent publication of photographs of her house). The rule for the new media is that censorship doesn’t work. The only thing that does is creating something new to take the place of the offending material. Five months on, Nestle is doing that, but the damage has been done.
Dealing with the new media demands a new approach – like the one you’ll find at gem.