JPMorgan, the biggest bank in the United States, has faced criminal investigations accompanied by $30 billion in fines and legal fees. Soooooo who’s bright idea was it to hold a Q&A with JPMorgan’s vice chairman Jimmy Lee on Twitter? Earlier this week JPMorgan tweeted this…

Their intention was to give college students the opportunity to communicate directly with senior executive Brian Marchiony. This wasn’t the case. Within 6 hours, the bank tweeted “#Badidea! Back to the drawing board” and within that time frame they received 6,000 responses. The #AskJPM hashtag was used in more than 24,000 posts but not in the way JPMorgan intended. The response was fast, vast, and absolutely hysterical.

In my Emarketing class we talked about the benefits and risks of a company using Twitter to communicate with the public. This is a prime example of how social media, if used in the wrong setting, could seriously tarnish a company’s reputation. The timing of a social media campaign has to be on point and you have to be prepared to handle the backlash as quickly has possible. It will be interesting to see how JPMorgan plays this failure off…Good luck to them.

If you got a kick out of this post, click here to view the top 13 most epic twitter fails by big brands.