The staff of Macquarie Bank this week showed how to turn a standard practice of wasting time forwarding emails into instant fame.
While Channel 7 recorded a live reaction to the Reserve Bank leaving interest rates unchanged something caught the viewers attention. In the background a Macquarie Bank staff member David Kiely is seen chatting with a colleague while flicking through images of Miranda Kerr.
The incident was perfect for viral and the YouTube clip of the broadcast had by 1pm Wednesday 3/2/2010 had around 200,000 views, but by 3pm Thursday 4/2/2010 around 768,000 views and continues to increase.
To show the viewer interest in the broadcast is has received 895 ratings scoring it a perfect 5 stars, with around 682 text comments. This looks to be a topic that will have a bit more momentum that Macquarie Bank would like. The problem for Macquarie Bank is that it is not just a case of people browsing by they are engaging, contributing and sharing the video with friends.
The perfect moment is when the staff member received the email “Turn around now” and turns to confront the camera focused on his screen.
The question of if he was setup by a colleague is not a issue i’m going to comment on, but it is more about the potential damaging ramifications for the Macquarie Bank brand. Being that the event happened around such an important moment in finance shouldn’t their staff’s focus be on making money for their clients, since it wasn’t even casual Friday.
The case is here also about how Macquarie Bank could have moved quickly within social media to possibly control or at least reduce the impact on their brand.
It even seems their competitors such as HSBC didn’t want to miss out and tried to subtly remind SMH readers today that their staff spend time on more productive tasks….
The coverage did have a bonus as it has helped Miranda Kerr pushing her 7 places to number #1 on the Bing xRank charts which monitors who the world is most searching for, as in who is hot and who is not.
Using social measurement platform ViralHeat, you can see the spike of interest across twitter and websites for Macquarie Bank since the incident aired.
The point is that any company needs to have some social media or pr plans in place for such an event no matter how obscure or unlikely, you don’t want to be in such a place unprepared….