Large banks like JP Morgan are thought to have played a central role in engineering the global financial collapse of 2008. Given the populist campaigns against big banks that occurred after the financial meltdown (see: Occupy Wall Street), this move appeared almost masochistic.
Considering this backstory, it’s unsurprising that commenters chimed in asking “Can I have my house back? #AskJPM” and “Do you have a specific number of people’s lives you needed to ruin before you considered your business model a success? #AskJPM.”
Unhappy meals
If the NYPD had looked to fast food chain McDonalds’ own failed attempt to enlist positive feedback on Twitter through its #McDStories campaign, it might have thought twice before creating the #myNYPD handle.
McDonalds started the campaign on January 24, 2012, and it left the gate strong, with a promoted tweet reading “Here are the great people who make our potatoes” and using the hashtag #meetthefarmers. But things got ugly quickly after the second promoted tweet, which read, “Tell us what you think of us,” alongside the #McDStories hashtag.
The latter tweet received 72,000 responses. While only about two percent were negative, those responses quickly spread across the Web. As a result, the company decided to pull the entire campaign just an hour after launching the program, according to CNN Money.
For example, one such reply from Twitter user @SkipSullivan stated, “One time I walked into McDonalds and I could smell Type 2 diabetes floating in the air and I threw up. #McDStories.”
The negative associations such comments evoke can have serious repercussions for a brand’s reputation. “Once you have a negative association it’s almost impossible to just remove the link from people’s minds,” marketing professor Gavan Fitzsimons told CNN Money.
The obvious take-away from these few case studies is that, given the Internet’s relative open architecture for free expression, those wishing to exercise some control over their public image might want to avoid such open-ended Internet queries.
We know that won’t happen though, don’t we.