Fonterra run an excellent Twitter account that happily engages with farmers and consumers alike, I’ve seen them come back to answer a question a few days after it was asked because they were researching the answer. They promote the good stories, both their own and those of farmers, and ignore the inevitable dairy criticism that comes their way. Fonterra will happily provide facts and references but they tend not to engage in debate.
The Green Party are also very good at maintaining that discipline; if for example a Green MP should suggest homeopathy as a viable cure for Ebola they will not even attempt to defend it. In fact they won’t even mention it on social media despite the storm of jokes and baiting. There may be a link to the single press release that addresses the situation, but like Fonterra there is no public engagement on the embarrassing issue.
While I’m sure there are spirited discussions behind the scenes at both Fonterra and The Greens they rarely spill over into the public arena, because to engage publicly just fans the flames of a negative story and keeps it visible for longer.
So when Greenpeace NZ ran a series of advertisements targeting the dairy industry I was very surprised to see DairyNZ lodge a complaint with the Broadcasting Standards Authority. I can guarantee you that Greenpeace were delighted with the news. A series of ads that were preaching to the converted and designed to put money in Greenpeace’s coffers were suddenly being talked about in print, TV news and social media. When DairyNZ inevitably lost the case the whole thing gained fresh legs, Greenpeace openly goaded DairyNZ on Twitter and happily and publicly rubbed our noses in it again and again. Of course an appeal has been lodged so more free publicity will be had.
The better strategy is to concentrate on what we are doing well and where we are headed, litigating is only ever an option if you’re sure of a win.
There are plenty of good farming stories out there; I watch videos on social media of dairy farmers all over the country confidently drinking water from the streams that run through their properties, quite rightly proud of the effort and expense they’ve gone to to maintain the environmental integrity of their farms. Those men and women are the farmers we should all aspire to be like and the ones I’d like to be reading about in the mainstream media, not that our lobby group picked a losing fight with another lobby group.
As individuals we’ll continue to promote our good stories to those we can reach, but I’d like to see our voices amplified rather than drowned out by a side show that, ironically, we’ve paid for ourselves.
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