February 11, 2008 | Monday

HSBC vs Facebook: an online protest forces the multinational to step back

By Admin  in Site Pages

When multinational bank HSBC decided in July 2007 to scrap its interest-free overdraft for graduates, it immediately met strong reactions from the student community. Furious graduates from all over the country started to organise their protest on Facebook, collecting thousands of support messages on a dedicated page on the social networking website, and inviting the public to boycott HSBC.

The viral campaign, which quickly attracted the attention of the national press, eventually forced HSBC into a U-turn over its 9.9% APR charges on graduate overdrafts. This high-profile crisis is a clear illustration of how social media’s can facilitate customer action to can make or break a product launch. By HSBC’s own admission, a multinational is “not too big to listen to its customers”.

Read the Times Online report on the affair here.