Financial giant JPMorgan Chase was forced to cancel a Twitter Q&A earlier this week after receiving a barrage of abusive tweets.
At least two-thirds of the 80,000 tweets sent using the hashtag #AskJPM were negative, according to Twitter analysis tool Topsy.
One of the company’s senior banks, Jimmy Lee, was planning on taking over JPMorgan’s Twitter page on Thursday in a bout of online promotion.
But rather than give consumers the opportunity to promote itself, Twitter users instead chose to criticise the bank, with tweets such as: "Quick! You’re in a room with no key, a chair, two paper clips, and a lightbulb. How do you defraud investors?"
"Sorry we ruined your hashtag event, if you could just apologise for your plunder of the global economy, I think we’d be even. #askjpm"
Most of the tweets were targeted at the bank’s $13 billion settlement for mis-selling mortgage-backed securities and its $6 billion London Whale trading losses.
JPMorgan backed out of the scheduled Q&A with the tweet: "Tomorrow’s Q&A is cancelled. Bad Idea. Back to the drawing board."
This is not the first time a company’s social media promotion has gone wrong. McDonalds try to promote its brand through the hashtag #mcdstories in January 2012, only to be met with consumers using the hashtag to highlight horror stories, such as finding foreign objects in burgers.
American Rifleman, a journal affiliated with the National Rifle Association, posted a pro-gun tweet as the mass shooting at a cinema in Colorado was unfolding in July 2012. The tweet itself appeared to have been pre-scheduled through Hootsuite, but was not picked up on until site regulators deleted it several hours later. The account was also deleted soon after.
And they say all publicity is good publicity…
