Facebook Crisis

Case Background:

Facebook has decided to build a new data centre in Prineville, Oregon. The decision was met positively by the local administration and citizens of Prineville, given its economic and business climate. Facebook also plans to reduce energy consumption in the long run, through better maintenance practices. However, about 60% of the energy that would be consumed in the process is being generated from coal. Greenpeace, an NGO, is not happy about this, since coal is one of the biggest contributors to global warming. In its attempt to voice its concerns regarding this data centre, Greenpeace has launched various initiatives and has also directly written to the Facebook CEO.  Despite Barry Schnitt’s communication with Greenpeace regarding the same, they have recently come up with a video to showcase the negative effects of this data centre. He needs to figure out a way to respond to this move, since the video is gaining popularity and it would show Facebook, as a company, in bad light.

Objective:

To understand how to respond to this pressure exerted by Greenpeace on Facebook

Situation Analysis

The following tabulations help us understand the context of the case.

Prineville as the new location for the data centre:

• With tremendous growth in the user base of Facebook, it had to come up with a new data centre to support this large number.
• After much consideration, Prineville was chosen as the location for the data centre since it provided the kind of weather conditions which would significantly reduce energy consumption.
• Being a rural location with a small population, an important wing of a globally popular tech company meant a huge deal for the people of Prineville.
• Facebook planned to employ 35+ new people and the governor even thanked Facebook for choosing Prineville.
• Being an economy which largely depended on forest products, the economic instability in the recent years had hit them hard and the unemployment rate was at an alarming 20%.

Greenpeace:

• Greenpeace had been successful in pressurizing the governments of various countries to stop their practices against nature.
• Greenpeace argued that the electricity that would be used at the data centre was generated from coal, one of the biggest contributors of global warming.
• It wanted Facebook to use its purchasing power and set up the plant at a location where the electricity was generated through a cleaner process.
• Greenpeace even sent a letter to the CEO of Facebook to voice its concerns and made the letter public.
• In its campaign against Facebook, Greenpeace had being using Facebook to voice its concerns.
• Despite communication from Facebook regarding their logic behind choosing Prineville and how it would benefit the environment in the long run, Greenpeace had stepped up the attack against Facebook through the internet.

Problem Diagnosis:

Symptom 1:

Schnitt wanted to make sure Facebook’s intentions were not wrongly projected in the media

Inference:

Since Facebook had no control over the source of electricity, it had done everything it could to make sure the processes were environment friendly. Also, the location would do more good than harm in a community where employment was an issue.