The last few days for Northern Rock, the UK mortgage lender, has been a whirlwind of damage limitation. In the 5 days since the story broke that emergency funds have been made available by the UK’s Bank of England to resolve “liquidity problems” – they have had more than a few headaches to manage.
5 days can be a lifetime for PR, for Northern Rock it’s been fairly catastrophic. On Thursday the 13th the BBC website breaks the story that the Bank of England have made emergency funds available to the building society . The following day saw an official statement appear and the stock value plummets – queues are seen outside the building society premises with nervous customers looking to withdraw their savings. As a result– Northern Rock’s IT infrastructure buckles and their website crashes continuously, inundated with customers using the online banking facility to withdraw their funds. The big media organizations were all over the story in a flash and the online community weren’t far behind.
While questions could be asked about how responsibly media organizations act in situations like this it is far more difficult to “contain” the news online – which can have much longer consequences. The statistics are fairly staggering – Google’s blog search shows 37,000+ posts in the last week alone regarding Northern Rock. Social network and bookmark sties (Digg, Del.icio.us etc) are awash with posts. Search for Northern Rock at Youtube and you’ll find video’s of the worried faces on customers queuing outside the banks branches. Wikipedia also covers the entry on Northern Rock (having been heavily edited during the period)
For Northern Rock these problems won’t go away over night. The internet being what it is the breadcrumb trail of negative PR will be around for sometime with the immediate impact tangible from the first SERPS page which includes the original message from the CEO, a BBC news story regarding the event and links to blog and google news posts. In hindsight it’s difficult to know what damage limitation exercise could be done online. The message is clear though – make a mistake and should the internet hear about it expect it to spread and spread wide and fast. Given the speed and depth to which this has spread – large organizations will no doubt be brainstorming what business practices are required to mitigate this is in the future.
Now a week after the initial murmurings and with comments made by the UK’s chancellor beginning to appease the situation (albeit after $5 Billion has been withdrawn) – it’s hard to know what the lasting impact will be on Northern Rocks PR. The trail left online will do little to entice potential customers or reassure existing ones – just how do you go about fixing such a negative event? While many PR firms have crisis management departments how these relate to the online world is not clear – it’ll be interesting to see how Northern Rock copes.
