Brett King has posted some example of banks struggling to understand and respond to social media, with HSBC, Bank Of America and ANZ the culprits.
The banks were criticised online by customers who had received poor service or had services removed, but they failed to take decisive action, action which could have allowed them to put their side of the story across and potentially placated the complainants (and more importantly, stopped the spread of the bad press).
King himself was one of those complaining:
Based on my regular Blog readings and traffic I could expect around 30-50,000 people to read my article, so I suspected word would get back to them fairly quickly and then I could theorized that I would be able to sing HSBC’s praises about their responsiveness to my problem via the blogosphere and Twitter. Unfortunately, no one but the innovation team who follow my Twitter feed was listening. So…they passed it up the chain. What happened next? Nothing…
At least they were monitoring the situation. In the other cases, there was no indication that they had any sort of reputation monitoring in place, so they could quickly respond. Reputation monitoring  should be a must-have for any marketing team now.
Even a basic Google Alert or Twitter search could be a good place to start, and cost nothing.
Companies do need to be careful about wading into social media and getting it wrong – there’s nothing worse than a company misjudging the response to a complaint and making things worse.
But a well thought through response allows a company to have some control over the conversation. Without any response, they have no control on how the problem might develop and spread.
