“Don’t believe everything you read.” It’s a byline for today’s cynical media consumer, ingrained into us from a young age by our parents, teachers and peers.
But it catches journalists out too. This morning, PR Week published a story claiming that HSBC was launching a ‘distinct digital offering’ to rival that of Facebook. It quoted directly from the 35-page pitch document, giving details of the pitch process and target demographics, and included a comment from HSBC’s head of press.
But two hours later, the HSBC press office tweeted the following:
This has been met by scepticism from PR Week, implying that perhaps the document is genuine and was leaked. So now who do we believe?
This is still being played out on Twitter as I write, but what is clear is that HSBC has reacted in a very relaxed manner, responding to questions in an informal, chatty tone and employing tongue-in-cheek hashtags (#sticktoyourstrengths). This reaction has already been described as “weird” and “patronising” by some – but if this is a genuine leak, HSBC is keeping its cool impressively well. Whether this scores points with the many thousands of people who were affected by HSBC’s online banking and ATM outages last week, however, remains to be seen…
