Snarknado: 1, JPMorgan: 0

Okay, normal blog service is herewith resuming. It’s Friday, and this week we witnessed another stellar example of what happens when your communications people don’t really understand social media in general and the Twitter-dot-com in particular.

It seems, my children, that someone—well, probably, a lot of someones—at JPMorgan & Chase thought it would be a good idea to have a nice, PR-worthy Q&A “exchange” between investment banker Jimmy Lee and…well, whoever wanted to compress questions into 140 characters using #AskJPM as the designator.

Oh, dear.

Because not only did that idea make it all the way to “Hey, you can ask Jimmy Lee everything” Twitter invitations, no one in their organization seems to have held her hand up and said, “Um, listen—have we thought this through? Because, you know, there are all kinds of people on Twitter; it’s not really like one of our annual stockholder meetings where we can keep out the riff-raff. Twitter is where all our riff-raff went. Just search on #EuroVision or #MileyCyrus. Bad things can happen there. Bad, bad things.”

But either that didn’t occur, or everyone was in such a rush to sit at the social media cool-kids’ table that they just steamrolled right over her.

Well, now we understand how they made so many egg-suckingly bad investments, don’t we? Anyone comes up with a crack-brained notion and they just run with it. Like they think they’ve got some sort of invisible shield around them, and what happened to BP can't happen to them.

And yet the utterly predictable happened. The Q&A session, scheduled for yesterday, never saw the light of JPMorgan day. Because long before then the Twitterati had deluged the hashtag with…well, all manner of questions that no investment banker wants to deal with. Some examples:

They should have closed it down right then, because it wasn't going to get any better.

See—what IB could handle the Kierkegaard? Clown suit is maybe doable, though.

At least that one’s economics-related.But who would publicly talk Kardashians?

And:

I confess that once I realized what was up, I, uh, well, I just… Look—how was I not? And I got a few retweets for the likes of:

“Would you hire me if I have a couple of #misdemeanor convictions on my record, or do I need a #felony? #AskJPM” And, “Which circle of Hell do you inhabit? I’m thinking 8^th, for fraud; but could be 4^th for greed. Or 9^th—treachery? Pls advise. #AskJPM”

But the one that really seemed to draw them in was, “Did you actually meet Satan, or did you do everything via email? #AskJPM”

Well—once you get going it’s like potato chips.

Anyhow, sometime during the day on Wednesday, JPMorgan slunk off into a corner office on the 74^th floor somewhere, licking their wounds. They cancelled the Q&A session. But the questions still remain.

And this tweet pretty much sums it up:

You can see for yourself. Just do a search on the hashtag #AskJPM. But don’t be drinking anything you don’t want to snort out onto your tablet.