Facebook is in the news again. On August 28, the BBC reported “A student protest against higher bank charges, organised on the Facebook website, is threatening to embarrass the HSBC bank into reversing its plans.” And just two days later, The Times reported, “Facebook protest forces interest rate climbdown.”
These news stories suggest that the activity on Facebook caused HSBC to change course. I wonder if that was really the case – or if it might have been the fact that the traditional media jumped on the story that made the difference.
For a start, what proportion of HSBC customers who were recent graduates chose to join the online protest? Let’s do the math. The Times reports that about 250,000 graduates were hit by interest rate charges of 9.9% on overdrafts up to ₤1,500. By the time HSBC announced its change of plans, over 6,500 people had joined the Facebook protest group set up by the National Union of Students (NUS).
So fewer than 3 percent of the people potentially affected joined the Facebook revolt. Did that small group really generate enough pressure to persuade HSBC to reverse a business decision it had made in response to bad debt and the misuse of credit?
The results of a quick, informal poll of recent graduates in Millward Brown’s London office suggest that while over half of those questioned log on to Facebook at least once a week, only 4 percent of them had heard of the protest through Facebook itself. Almost nine times as many - 35 percent - had heard about it through traditional news media. The rest were unaware of the issue.
So while the Facebook revolt was a catalyst for the wider news coverage, it was the latter which really caused HSBC to take notice. Add to that the timing of the coverage, just when banks are seeking to sign up new students at the start of the academic year and the pressure was on.
So why are reporters from traditional media giving credit to Facebook for something they helped make happen? Here are three possibilities:
1. Facebook is newsworthy and a ready source of stories. This one was just too topical to ignore.
2. HSBC is a big advertiser, and the traditional media would rather blame Facebook than admit they helped publicize the protest.
3. Reporters are not good at math. To them, perhaps 6,000 seemed like a big number, even though it was only a tiny percentage of those affected.
Whichever way you look at it, the Facebook protest on its own would probably not have caused HSBC to back down. It took wider coverage in the traditional media to do so, and the news media’s fascination with the social network phenomenon was probably as much a reason for the coverage as the story itself. And that coverage in turn just adds to the hype surrounding the power of social networks like Facebook, Friendster and Bebo. Are they really more powerful than a coordinated postal or e-mail protest or are they simply more public and therefore newsworthy?
I believe it’s the latter. A postal or e-mail campaign would lack the visibility of the Facebook protest, which effectively provided the NUS with the digital equivalent of a rally outside HSBC’s headquarters. It required less time to organize, was far cheaper and was accessible to many. A rally of 6,500 people would undoubtedly have made the news 10 years ago, but it would have been far more difficult to pull off. Now you can amass a protest group with just a few clicks of the mouse. So the real power of social networks rests in their very public nature and the news media’s fascination with them.
What lesson can marketers take away from this? Social networks are a great place to seed marketing campaigns, but to get them to flourish you will need to add a good dose of traditional media coverage.
I know, I sound like a broken record on the subject of social networks. Come on then, tell me why I am wrong. Oh, and while you are at it, what widgets should I add to my Facebook page?
Tags: Millward Brown, Nigel Hollis, Facebook, social networking, media, traditional media, HSBC
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