This story is just too funny to ignore. The PR department of JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), one of the Big Banks in perennial trouble with the Justice Department [eight current investigations – but who‘s counting?], came up with what they believed to be a whiz-bang idea to shine their tarnished image: Set up a Twitter account that permits followers to ask questions of a senior executive. The hashtag was #AskJPM. According to the article, one observer dubbed it “Snarkpocalypse.” Read the comments here.
The online forum, which the bank canceled late yesterday, was intended in part to give college students an opportunity to communicate directly with a senior executive, said Brian Marchiony, a spokesman for the New York-based company.“#Badidea! Back to the drawing board,” the bank posted less than six hours after its original post, which drew more than 6,000 responses from users in that span, according to social media tracking service Topsy. The #AskJPM hashtag had more than 24,000 posts on Twitter as of 10 a.m. New York time, according to Topsy.
This effort has to rank up near the top of bonehead PR moves. Apparently, the brainiacs at JPM figured it was high time that they crawled out from the spider hole they’d been hiding in for the past five years. They apparently assumed that the collective memory of the American public was akin to that of a five-year old hyperactive child, who would forget the bank’s serial transgressions of the past half-decade.
So what type of tweets did their 6-hour adventure in social media elicit? Here are some examples from the Bloomberg article:
- “Can I have my house back?” @AdamColeman4 posted;
- “Is it true ‘JPM stands for ‘Just Pay More’?’’ asked @SconsetCapital;
- ‘‘What’s your favorite type of whale?’’ wrote @ObsoleteDogma, [referring to the “London Whale” scandal that cost JPM something on the order of $6.2 billion in trading losses and $100 million in fines.]
- For a peek at the reader comments in the Bloomberg article, go to link here.
There isn’t a lot of sympathy for JPM’s misguided effort at social media. Perhaps before trying something like this again, they should first check their Q-Score…say in about ten more years.
