Lessons In Reputation Management: Facebook vs. HSBC

The other day I wrote: "Facebook has the ability to become the single most important platform for grassroots activism on the internet."

A great example of this came last week in the UK when student's in England successfully used Facebook to take on banking giant, HSBC.

For the last few weeks The National Union of Students have been using Facebook not to broadly target HSBC, but rather, to focus their anger on a very specific action taken by HSBC - the reversal of a decision to do away with interest-free overdrafts for recent college graduates in the UK.

Late last month, using Facebook's user generated groups tool, over 6,000 students quickly rallied together and threatened to boycott the bank.

Largely due to the growing Facebook protest, HSBC decided last week to reverse their decision and not charge students a 9.9% APR on their overdrafts. They also stated that they would be refunding interest charges collected in August.

The BBC quoted NUS vice president Wes Streeting as saying:

"There can be no doubt that using Facebook made the world of difference to our campaign. By setting up a group on a site that is incredibly popular with students, it enabled us to contact our members during the summer vacation far more easily than would otherwise have been possible. It also meant that we could involve our former members - the graduates who were going to be most affected by this policy."

What's most interesting about how Facebook was used by the students was not that they targeted HSBC.  Rather, it was that the students used Facebook to hyper-target and focus their protest on a very specific niche decision. 

Why should the HSBC protest on Facebook matter to brands?

Because it signals a new trend where social networking sites like Facebook are increasingly being used not to broadly target companies like Nike or Wal-Mart, but rather to focus their protest on very niche decisions that they want reversed.