The Help Was Not Helpful

I gave a presentation a couple of weeks ago in New York City to credit union officers about the legal risks of engaging in social media activities. One of the entities that I told my audience I thought was doing a decent job in social media was Bank of America's "Help" Twitter feed. From my personal observations, their "youngsters" seem to do a good job of handling customers who may be frustrated dealing with other segments of the giant bank's customer service octopus.

I guess I should monitor BofA Help more frequently. Digiday's Saya Weissman recounts a series of tone deaf tweets by a BofA Help "tweeter" that lead a casual observer to wonder whether someone was on Quaaludes and, if so, who. Responding to an allegation by Occupy LA that the bank should stop stealing people's homes by offering to review Occupy LA's account make you wonder about a number of things, including the following speculation by Ms. Weissman: "The immediate and understandable assumption was that the bank’s Twitter feed is run by a bot – a program that automatically replies to tweets that mention it. Bafflingly, this turns out not to be the case. A bank spokesperson explained to Digiday that real people are, in fact, behind all of the brand’s tweets."

A spokesperson for the bank insisted that real, live, human "bots" are tweeting those gems. Weissman claims that the bank's "utter lack of online competence...merely reinforced these angry tweeters’ view of the company as a faceless, heartless conglomerate." She concludes that if this is the best "help" that BofA can offer, "who needs enemies?"

I guess I wouldn't have been that harsh on the tweeter, who was likely proceeding in compliance with a carefully scripted line that he or she was required to follow. On the other hand, you have to wonder about the bank's guidelines for initiating "conversations" on Twitter. If it's whenever the bank's name is mentioned, then there ought to be some requirement that before the BofA employee "tweet"s, they be required to actually comprehend the content of the tweet to which they are "responding."

The proposed FFIEC Guidelines on social media compliance that we've previously discussed are shot through, from stem to stern, with concern about "reputational risk." Such risk is posed not only by technical violation of laws or regulations. It's also posed by ineptness.

You don't have to be perfect all of the time. However, if you're going to be incompetent any of the time, expect to pay a reputational price. Even (or, perhaps, especially) in cyberspace, it's hard to hide.