The Nestle Family twitstorm

I've been in the Nati for the past two days, where, in addition to presenting some kickass work and attending a brainstorm with my clients, I've been sampling Skyline Chili and Graeter's ice cream, watching Glee from a giant bathtub at the Cincinnatian Hotel and following the #Nestlefamily twitstorm.

You see, Nestle invited a bunch of parent bloggers to their headquarters for two days. They are far from the first major packaged goods company to invite bloggers in for a little wining and dining. The mom blogger junkets started in earnest with Johnson & Johnson's Camp Baby (which I was invited to but didn't attend back in early 2008), and since then Kraft, Campbell's, General Mills and Frito-Lay have all feted well-known mom bloggers.

As a marketer, I think the mom blogger invitationals are brilliant. For the cost of a few plane tickets, samples and meals, you get hundreds of media mentions and an instant brand ambassador with huge reach. It's a bargain. You also get to focus group these women (and a few men) and find out what's important to them, culling information you can use for product development, advertising and a variety of other purposes.

But what do the mombloggers get out it, aside from a free trip and a chance to hang with friends? Are they building their visibility and personal brand at the cost of being viewed as a sellout? And, in the case of the Nestle invitational, are they shilling for a corporation many view as unethical?

Like most people, I'm aware of the horrors Nestle inflicted in the third world in the 1970s and 80s with its aggressive marketing of infant formula. I saw it with my own eyes when I lived in Pakistan in the late 1980s. But I thought things had changed. Phd in Parenting, in this exhaustive post, claims abuses continue and challenges bloggers to decline Nestle's invitation or at least ask the company some tough questions while there.

For those who complain that mommybloggers are a bunch of navel-gazing ninnies (as some have with regard to the Motrin Moms twitstorm), behold the discussion of Nestle's corporate ethics that emerged on Twitter yesterday under the #nestlefamily hashtag. A few well-meaning moms were raising real questions about global issues to a company that said it wanted to open the channels of communication, but it quickly devolved into a shouting match pitting breastfeeding advocates against defensive formula feeders who perhaps didn't understand that formula feeding can be extremely dangerous in a country where access to safe, clean water isn't guaranteed or where parents might run out of funds for formula and end up watering it down to save money.

Peppered between these posts were silly little tweets from attendees talking up Nesquik, Stouffer's meals and cake mix recipes and psycho crackpots accusing Nestle of supporting infanticide and child labor. It was train wreck, in my opinion.

Shortly after I posted this, friend and fellow Chicago Moms Blogger Kim Moldofsky tweeted me with "I was waiting for the part about what to do next time or lessons learned." I'm not sure I have any real answers. What I do know is that bloggers love attention (I'm no exception). So when a big, multi-national corporation romances us, we get a little weak in the knees. It's easy to get swept off your feet in a flurry of four-star hotel stays, airline tickets and gifts. But take it from someone who knows what's happening on the brand side: don't be a cheap date. Don't tweet and blog free word-of-mouth because you've been wined and dined and you're so very much in love. Do your do diligence (research, ask tough questions, demand better products and service) and then, if you're still the brand's number 1 fan, by all means sing their praises from the rooftops.

Worth reading:

Crunchy Domestic Goddess: Did we learn anything from the Nestle Family Twitter-storm?

Pop Discourse: On Bloggers, Breastfeeding, Formula, Mortality, Change and the Nestle Family Event

It pays to tweet (the squeaky wheel gets the grease)

If you follow me on Twitter or are friends with me on Facebook, you probably know by now that I endured the flight delay to end all flight delays on Wednesday. I--along with two of my co-workers--was scheduled to depart Chicago's O'Hare airport at 12 noon. We boarded the plane 30 minutes late, sat on the plane for a couple of hours, and then hauled ourselves and our stuff off the plane for another hour or so in the waiting lounge. Then we reboarded the aircraft and sat on the tarmac for 4 hours. That's two feature-length crappy movies! And, while the flight attendant comped our bad red wine, I was willing to pay top dollar for some Lay's Stax salty snacks--if only they had any on board.

At 9:20pm, nearly 9 1/2 hours after our original departure time, United finally took us off the plane for good and canceled our flight.

It sucked, royally. And I used my Blackberry to tweet my growing frustration. I included @UnitedAirlines, the official Twitter ID for United in many of my tweets, and I suspect someone out there was listening, because minutes after my final, frustrated update, I received an email to my personal email address expressing "sincere apologies for the experience you had on Flight 680 on July 29, 2009." Even better, United offered me my choice of make-good gifts. My colleagues, neither of whom made their suffering known to the Twittersphere (is that even a word?), did not receive an email or the promise of a $150 flight credit or 7000 bonus miles.

So there you have it, Twitter-doubters. There's more to micro-blogging than letting people know what you're having for dinner.

7/31/09 @11:02 update: turns out the colleague in First Class, the one who's a super-duper Platinum Double-Plus Rewards Member, also got a credit. A $200 credit. The gal sitting back in Economy with me is furiously penning her letter.

I did it, I tweeted

Last week I heard an intriging NPR story on the power of Twitter, and today Shannan's Mommy Bits post sealed the deal. I'm on Twitter. You can follow me.

Won't you join me in this brave new world of microblogging?