Kim and Kanye christen baby North not Nat; West that is

Apologies for the headline.

NatWest Bank caused a minor ripple through social media today - no, not another network fail - they cracked a joke, on Twitter no less. See below...

Not sure if the NatWest brand police know the full backstory of Kim and Kanye but either way, someone in the social media team either just seized the moment, or navigated all the internal sign offs necessary to push the tweet button.

As I write it has been RTd over 2,000 times, which is quite an amplification rate.

Humour is risky territory for big corporations at the best of times. For banks, right now, it is plain dangerous and probable to backfire. But reviewing the conversation around this tweet, it seems most of the dialogue is positive that a bank has demonstrated the potential to have a personality, and to be connected with the world that at least some of their customer demographic inhabits.

That doesn't mean you want your bank manager to wear a spinning bow tie and crack Knock Knock jokes but it does mean that what is acceptable or appropriate changes with context and environment. Style and tone can be changed in social environments giving banks the opportunity to humanize their dialogue with customers. And in this context customers didn't seem to find it jarring or inconsistent.

It might also be a teeny tiny pointer to show one way how banks might slowly, consistently, laboriously piece-by-piece, be able to re-establish a more genuine, human dialogue with their customers in order to re-build their reputations.

One Twitter does not a summer make, but its a start.