BP Tweeted what?!? A Twitter hijacking makes a sticky situation worse
The web’s eco-warriors and carbon crusaders have really been sticking it to BP ever since the Deepwater Horizon spill began leaking barrels and barrels of raw crude into the Gulf of Mexico last month. Last week, Greenpeace invited the public to trash redesign the BP logo as part of its latest social media-inspired pressure campaign. Now, there’s another source of embarrassment for the Big Oil heavy, a Twitter-led crusader to undermine BP’s outreach efforts one Tweet at a time.As the Wall Street Journal reports today, the Twitter feed @BPGlobalPR, which masquerades – in name only – as that of an official BP public relations mouthpiece, is blasting out messages that are really getting under people’s skins. One reads:
“If we had a dollar for every complaint about this oil spill, it wouldn’t compare to our current fortune. Oil is a lucrative industry!”
The problem for the embattled oil giant is that many people believe the satirically arrogant Tweets are coming from BP itself. You might forgive the duped as the feed described itself as, “This page exists to get BP’s message and mission statement out into the twitterverse!”
The other major problem is that the fake BP Twitter account now has over 18,000 followers (the WSJ reports 11,400 as it’s story went to press overnight, showing its meteoric rise in the past few hours), not bad for an account that was launched on May 19th. Meanwhile, BP’s official Twitter feed – @BP_America – and a second to coordinate clean-up news – @Oil_Spill_2010 (could you have possibly come up with a more unnerving handle? Will there be an @Oil_Spill_2011 next year?) – which are meant to counteract all the bad publicity and deliver timely updates on the clean-up, have about half the number of followers and are quickly getting buried by the satirical Tweeters as the chart here shows:
The appeal of the fake BP Twitter feed is easy to see. It taps into the public’s outrage by conjuring up a BP brand persona that is arrogant and uncaring, a stark difference, mind you, from the image BP is trying to put across on its official Twitter feed. Case in point: While BP is Tweeting that volunteers are pitching in to protect the coastline we see these incongruous Tweets, the last messages you’d expect to see from a firm in the middle of a lengthy PR crisis:
What we cannot understand is why BP is allowing someone to completely hijack its message. What could it have done better? Well, for starters, it could have had its Twitter accounts “verified” so the public would know at least that its own Tweets are legit and that others are not to be trusted. And BP has done nothing that we can see to distance itself from the fake Tweeter. Not a single alert to say don’t trust the person behind the @BPGlobalPR curtain.
Maybe BP really doesn’t care.
Correction: In a previous version of this story, I misstated that @Oil_Spill_2010 was an official BP Twitter PR feed, when, in fact, it was set up by the federal agencies involved in the clean-up, a feed that, at times, includes BP’s response. We regret the error.
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16 Comments »
BP’s PR woes get even worse on Twitter. Is BP really this clueless or just totally unconcerned: http://tinyurl.com/22sxd9z
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#BP Tweeted what?!? A Twitter hijacking makes a sticky situation worse http://ow.ly/1PzB3
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BP Tweeted what?!? A Twitter hijacking makes a sticky situation worse: The web’s eco-warriors and carbon crusaders… http://bit.ly/9kQC4A
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Does your company have a plan for this? If not, @raidious can help! A Twitter hijacking makes a sticky situation worse http://bit.ly/dn1xnk
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Social Media Influence: Social Media News & Intelligence » BP …: Last week, Greenpeace invited the public to tra… http://bit.ly/aIkNEY
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BP Tweeted what?!? A Twitter hijacking makes a sticky situation worse http://ow.ly/17uBJ2
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Deepwater Horizon Response – and its Twitter feed @oil_spill_2010 – is a collection of federal agencies that provides oversight of BP and is dedicated to securing the well, fighting the spill offshore, protecting the coast and minimizing impacts on the environment and local economy. While the response includes BP, @oil_spill_2010 is not part of BP PR.
“Will there be an @Oil_Spill_2011 next year?” Yes. ( http://bit.ly/dsRxWA )
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BP Tweeted what?!? A Twitter hijacking makes a sticky situation worse http://bit.ly/dn1xnk
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Social Media Influence: Social Media News & Intelligence » BP … http://ow.ly/17uK58
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Thank you for clarifying all the parties involved in the @oil_spill_2010 feed. We have to ask: Who decided on the “2010″ handle? This won’t be an annual event, right?
Twitter’s role in battle with BP…#socialmedia: http://bit.ly/bXiFxk
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[...] replete with Twitter flash protests, celebrity backing, damning homemade documentaries and satirical updates from an official-seeming company mouthpiece, the fastest growing account on Twitter. Where have we [...]
BP Tweeted what?!? A Twitter hijacking makes a sticky situation worse http://ow.ly/1qyVbl
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Okay, so the “sea fart” Tweet kept me laughing for a while – helped get me through the afternoon. http://ow.ly/1SIOs
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[...] forced to beef up its social media outreach channels to defend its rep. Prior to the spill, it did almost nothing with its corporate Twitter and Facebook channels. Those channels now appear to be rigorously [...]
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