Unsuspecting Twitter user gets mistaken for a bank

FOLLOWING Natwest's prolonged computer problems, unsuspecting Twitter user Natalie Westerman has been bombarded with messages from irate Natwest customers.

Despite Westerman's Twitter description stating, "I'm a 22 year old woman and I'm not a bank," and thanks largely to her Twitter handle of @natwest, she has found herself mistakenly but not too surprisingly associated with Natwest bank. Today Westerman found her Twitter inbox filled with tweets from journalists who wanted to speak with the lady that chose the same Twitter identifier as the name of a bank.

Natwest - the bank - and a number of its sister banks in the Royal Bank of Scotland's RBS Group have been hit by a botched IT upgrade. The RBS Group banks' customers have been unable to receive payments and branches have been kept open longer in order to help customers with their accounts.

With Natwest's IT department doing its bit to increase public goodwill towards large banks, Westerman has had to deal with a deluge of mistakenly pointed tweets from irate Natwest customers, but she has taken it in stride and even managed to deal with Fleet Street's finest who wanted to speak with her.

Given that Natwest has a Twitter account, @natwest_help, it is surprising that the firm didn't choose @natwest in the first place. According to Westerman's Twitter feed, she opened the account around April 2009, at a time when Twitter should have been on the radar of firms like Natwest as a way to interact with customers.

While Ms Westerman is enjoying the trappings of fame, or rather her choice of a Twitter handle, Natwest has been left reeling after a week of bad publicity. µ