Some call it being in the echo-chamber. Others call it navel-gazing. Still others say it's living inside the bubble. Whatever you call it, there is a tendency for some of us who work in social media to live too much inside of that world and not think about what's going on in the rest of the world. Bank of America just found that out the hard way.
In a Digiday article yesterday, Bank of America was blasted for their customer service twitter gaffes, saying the world's third largest bank had an "utter lack of understanding for how the social media platform works." You can read the whole thing on Digiday, complete with screenshots of the tweets, but the upshot is this: a man upset about his foreclosure was writing a message about it in chalk outside the bank. Police chased him off and he took to twitter. As sympathizers posted tweets mentioning the bank, the bank's social team responded.
Unfortunately for Bank of America, the person in their social team answering didn't understand the context of the tweets and sent back messages offering to help them with problems they might be having with their account, feeding the feeling that the bank was a huge, out-of-touch uncaring corporate entity.They swear they have a 100-person team and all tweets are live. But, people make mistakes. Especially when they can't see outside the echo chamber.
I'm sure the person doing the tweeting was earnest in wanting to help, but they hadn't followed the larger story or done enough digging through the twitter conversations to understand the context of the tweets. They were just looking at unhappy sentiment towards the bank and offering to help in the same manner as if someone walked in the bank complaining about a bad transaction fee.
We've all seen examples of this. The solution is that we need to make sure our social team, watches and listens to something beyond the social channels in front of them. Yes, you can get great, quick news feed via twitter. However they are often wrong, rushed out in haste on overheard info. Like journalists of old (you know, the 90's), we need to look into multiple sources and dig a little deeper to see a clearer, more rounded picture of the world.
So, yes, the Bank of America team should have known better. And yes, these things happen. But, they shouldn't if we're doing our jobs correctly and are willing to go beyond getting out a fast response to any customer with a twitter account. What do you think? Has this happened to you or someone you know? What did you do about it? What should we all do about it?
Mike McClure, Searching for deeper understanding
