Johan Schepers pointed me to a sneaky little Google Ad that appears when you type "Standard Bank" into Google. The ad seems to be intermittent (maybe for budget reasons so don't click dammit!) so here is a screenshot:

The cool part comes when you click through to Gideon Galloway’s My Standardbank Story site, the tag line: “Uninspired, Unmotivated, Uninvolved!” - Definitely my experience. The shocking story of how Standard Bank treated me, a supposed valued client. - Gideon Galloway

Basically Gideon was a happy Standard Bank customer until he tried to buy a property, you can read all the ins and outs of what sounds like a truly revolting and lengthy process on his site.
The site even has a tell your story section where you can go and give an account of the bad service you’ve experienced and a Hellopeter feature which states that the bank has over 1900 compliments and complaints – no prizes for guessing that the vast majority are complaints.

Ah, Consumer Generated Media strikes again.

Now personally I don't think Standard Bank's service is that much worse than the rest, I've tried the lot and they will inevitably all piss you off at some stage. The thing I love about this is how easy it’s been for Gideon Galloway to spread the word about his negative experience... and good for him! A society needs more vocal consumers, at the end of the day it's better for everyone.

So what should Standard Bank do about this? Respond to the conversation of course.
The bigger question is do they even know about it yet? You would think that they would have found this by now as the domain was registered more than 2 months ago and I'm sure the site has been up for at least a few days and that’s long enough to find something if you're doing your Online Reputation Monitoring properly. At the very least their PPC manager should/would have picked it up. Although based on a few cursory searches it doesn't seem like they are running a PPC campaign. So we’ll have to wait and see what happens.

If you’re interested in the state of Online Reputation Management in South Africa’s banking sector check out the eMarketing 101 case study we did on the subject; ORM: Keeping Your Ears to the Ground.