Thing We Can Learn from Nescafé Hungary Social Media Crisis
Currently, Nescafé Hungary runs a competition that required a contestant to submit an idea for project (picture/video) and get the most ‘likes’ to win $5000.
A member of the 9GAG.com community, Janos Szolnoki aka Jani posted a video to Hungary and posted a comic to 9GAG.com asking the fellow members to like the video of his 11-year-old handicapped brother to enter the contest in hopes of giving his brother a special Christmas gift. The contestants needed at least 20 ‘likes’ on Facebook to be considered and before being assesed by the judges. With over 47.000 ‘likes’ at time of posting, it turns out that Janos and his brother were banned from the competition for the way they had appealed to get the votes. Now, the
posted on its Facebook page:
“Dear All,
“Regarding the rules: in the first round of the game you had to upload your project and satisfy the minimun requirements – meaning collecting 20 likes in order to be short listed. ( So in the first round, not the high number of likes was basis of the decision!) Then the jury subjectively assessed them and chose 30 to go to second round. In the second round there will be 5 winner…s, out of them 3 will chosen by the jury and 2 of them are those who collected the most likes. Refers to the rules of the game, not the ones who collected the most likes get the chance to be shortlisted. Those who were not selected to the shortlist are not banned, but only 30 them were selected for the second round (at the basis of the decision was not the high number of the likes, but subjective assessment of the jury).”
With so many negative comments, Hungary responded as below :
“Dear All,
“Many of you have asked for clarity about the voting and judging process for the Nescafé created this competition with aim of financially supporting project ideas and were delighted to receive 637 applications. All entries were considered by a judging panel and shortlist of 30 project ideas were selected – these included an ambulance for children and a shelter programme for homeless people. The judging was based on a broad range of criteria, not based on the number pf ‘like’ received (a minimum of only 20 like was required). No personal circumtances had any bearing on the judges’ final decision. We are looking forward to the rest of the competition and helping the winning entry its charitable goal with a donation of 5 million HUF.”
What we can learn from this case is, the internet has been a huge part of many people lives. With Social Media trends that constantly changing, companies need to start to think about their strategies a lot more and execute it in proper manners. If companies wanted to create a competition, they need to go into the details in making the rules. If the rules are not clear enough, it could backfire the companies itself. Crisis that Hungary is facing right now can cause severe and even fatal backlash on their company, it’s often resulting in brand reputation damage, lost customers or drop in stock market value. In our opinion, Hungary has handled the situation in a pretty good way. They gave a clarification and they contacted . As a digital agency, we should do a digital monitoring more often and accurate to anticipate a case like this.
