BofA turns to Facebook to win back public

Bank of America has a reputation problem the way Bernie Madoff does, in the sense that the injury was entirely self-inflicted. Whether robosigning illegal or questionable mortgage foreclosures, performing so poorly that Warren Buffett dumped his holdings in the company in February (before recentlyinvesting $5 billion again in a deal too good to pass up), charging consumers a $5 monthly fee to use their debit cards, or turning to a hefty federal bailout to get themselves out of the trouble they themselves created, BofA should have found it difficult to make itself look worse.

However, difficult is not the same as impossible. BofA has decided to redeem itself through the power of Facebook. It has been running ads asking people to agree that “community is important in America.” However, the ads don’t show the name of the company, even though clicking like supports “an official Bank of America Facebook page.” Yup, BofA has just invented robo-liking.

Cause we said so

A blogger on Open Salon who calls himself tr ig noticed the ads last week. (Note, his post is not safe for work computer filters.) He doesn’t like BofA, calling the organization “notorious community killers themselves.”

The bitterness may come from his claim that Bank of America foreclosed on his home even though he had “jumped through every single hoop” to modify his mortgage and was verbally told that the modification was approved. Or maybe it comes from allegedly getting a letter from the bank in April 2011, nearly 5 months after he had to move out, saying that he was now current on his mortgage payments.


Read more here