Bank of America is in the trenches right now. Like most B of A customers last week, I could not access my account info while attempting to login from www or via mobile device. Of course I jumped on Twitter to follow them for status. As I watched the stream on Twitter unravel, watching everyone’s opinions and complaints about B of A fly by on TweetDeck, I was checking out what Liliana Dumitru-Steffens saw before writing her article “Online PR Crisis: Bank of America Website Down, no Explanation from the Owner“. At first my thoughts were, “cool, they’re on Twitter, they’re gonna let us know what’s up.” Instead what I saw was the online bludgeoning of the folks who were running the Twitter accounts on behalf of B of A by all the customers, but Bank of America was not effectively backing them process-wise. While the customers were snapping at them right and left, shooting first and asking questions later, I realized a couple things. First, I could tell that their Twitter reps were genuinely wanting to help. The problem was the second issue -  they were probably to some extent not getting the info they needed from their own employer to respond accordingly with some details that would’ve at least given the B of A customers a little more patience during the crisis.

A Couple Tips for a PR Crisis

1. Before choosing Twitter as an official and legitimate support channel for your company, make sure your PR/Communications team are ready to support your Twitter reps with a process for delivering details/status on issues expeditiously so that you don’t hang your social media reps out to dry for your customers to devour and lambaste them when there is a crisis. Sending your soldiers out to battle with no weapons or gear is bad.
2. Always stay in front of the PR crisis publicly, with a sense of urgency, and mean it. When a bad PR hit goes down for your company or client on Twitter/Facebook, especially when there are customers being effected (and in this case, they’re hooked in financially which makes them extra edgy), this is your moment to shine and wave the flag of corporate transparency to put them at ease. Customers know that websites have issues, that they get hacked, that they crash or become unavailable. Welcome to technology! However, if they can’t clearly see that you are coordinated with your internal teams with the latest updates, rolling out practical sets of expectations every half hour or so with the latest news, they will hate you quickly and easily. Let them know you are fighting for their right to have a good customer experience.

Also check out the Huffington Post article: “Bank Of America Website DOWN: 2010 Outage Affects Online Banking“. There are some good nuggets in there as well.

Onward.