Estonia's national mail carrier buys critical Facebook group
State-owned company Eesti Post, which operates under the Omniva brand, bought a social media group critical of it last year for at least €10,000. Since December, the company has been running the group itself, appointing as administrator a Lithuanian who does not speak Estonian, Õhtuleht reported.
The Facebook group "Omniva (Eesti Post) on kohutav ettevõte" ("Omniva (Eesti Post) is a terrible company"), filled with critics, cost the state-owned company a five-figure sum, Õhtuleht reported Wednesday.
The group's creator, Rainer Peterson, who sold it to Omniva last year, had launched it more than a decade ago. Most of its content consisted of people's criticism of Omniva's operations, along with some warnings about scam messages sent under Omniva's name — essentially, posts about what customers felt was wrong with the state-owned company. In effect, it had become a community dedicated mainly to providing negative feedback to the company, the newspaper said.
Last December — on the same day he joined the group — Peterson was replaced as administrator by Lithuanian national Mindaugas Šlikas, whose only connection to Estonia is that he has been working for more than three years at Omniva, a company owned by Estonians. According to Õhtuleht, Omniva paid Peterson €10,000 for the rights to the group.
Peterson was bound by a non-disclosure clause in the purchase agreement, the paper added, noting that if he revealed the background of the ownership change, the company could simply demand the return of the payment.
Company communications manager Madiken Oja declined to answer questions about the price, citing the same confidentiality clause as the group's former owner.
After Omniva took over the group, several senior Eesti Post employees began participating more actively and it turned into a sort of customer service channel. According to the paper, reasonable complaints now receive responses from Omniva staff, while more outlandish ones are met with humor from the company's employees.
Oja pledged that Omniva would not interfere with the group's content and that it would continue exactly as before, stressing that the sole aim of the state-owned company was to monitor customer feedback on parcel services in Estonia in order to better meet market expectations, needs and concerns.
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Editor: Mait Ots, Marcus Turovski
