Reputation Capital

9

SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE RISE OF THE STAKEHOLDER

IN 2011, I WAS WRITING a story for broadcast about a 22-year-old woman named Molly Katchpole. She’d collected more than three hundred thousand signatures on a Change.org petition opposing a new five-dollar monthly fee introduced by Bank of America for customers to use their debit card.¹ It was just five bucks, but the backlash was emblematic of the consumer outrage toward financial institutions at the time expressed by the Occupy Wall Street movement. The grassroots campaign was fueled by social media and mainstream media coverage, and the bank capitulated after just a month, scrapping its plans for the fee. It was the moment I realized the tables had turned: by asserting its influence, an online ...