Blogger pulls post against NAB’s social media site

I posted about this criticism earlier in the week. Now, just a few days later ITnews has reported that Sydney blogger Cheryl Gledhill has pulled that post down and left this message:

You’ve probably reached this page as you’ve read about the NAB social media experiment.

Molt:n has decided to take this post down due to the resulting media shitstorm – this little blog post was blown out of proportion. Nothing to see here – how about you go and see some kittens instead?

The response to Cheryl’s original post prompted a public response from NAB:

“NAB created www.myfuturebank.org to seek feedback from consumers on what they were looking for in a bank. This was a genuine attempt to collect information in order to make UBank a great banking experience for our customers.

“There has been no authorised attempt to market UBank by NAB employees contributing to independent blogs.

“If NAB responds to a blog entry, the contributor is clearly identified as a member of our organisation to ensure transparency with the public.

“Any unidentified comments are unauthorised and are not necessarily the view of the Bank. NAB has not authorised marketing activity on any other blog sites for the promotion of UBank.”

I think Cheryl, like other bloggers, has to realise that if you are going to write strong stuff sticking it to big corporations you have to be prepared to back your criticisms when you get a reaction. While Cheryl now seems to have been taken aback by the ’shitstorm’ her post provoked, I, and presumably others, linked to her post because she drew my attention to it (via Twitter).