Thursday, May 2, 2019

Chasing your customers


Poor, poor JPMorgan Chase. For all their squillions in assets, and the billions they pay their senior executive team, they just do not get this whole social media thing.

It’s been five and a half years since someone thought it would be a good idea to have an Ask Me Anything Twitter session with the investment banking side’s vice chairman Jimmy Lee. Before he even got into his corner office that week, Twitter had dumped so thoroughly on the concept that JPMorgan cancelled the session.

I’m proud to say that I joined the squadrons of trolls and did my part, my first experience ever with drawing even a tiny prick of blood.

It was a classic misstep—a total fiasco—and they don’t appear to have learned from it. Because on Monday, the consumer side of the megalith tweeted something that someone thought was clever advice for their struggling customers—under the hashtag #MondayMotivation—and the response was so [predictably] overwhelmingly negative, that they took down the tweet in less than three hours.


But of course, the evil that tweets do live long after their bones are interrèd. Twitterati continued to pile on to screen caps of the tweet, and here are some of the examples:










Two members of Congress who have been forthright in their criticism of Big Banks (both, coincidentally, women and Democrats) had a few thoughts to tweet. First up, Representative Katie Porter, who only a couple of weeks ago dragged JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon in a House committee hearing by running him through the parlous financial situation of one of his actual employees in her Southern California district. She repeatedly asked the guy who received a compensation package of $31M last year what advice he’d give this bank teller on how to make ends meet. And he repeatedly replied, “I’ll have to think about that.”



Presumably he’s thought about it and would now advise his employees to eat the food already in their fridges and stop taking taxis for three-block rides.




At some point during the day, a somewhat chastened @Chase posted this non-apology:



But here’s the tweet that pretty much sums up the world’s reaction:


As for JPMorgan’s social media woes: womp, womp.



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