BP has finally made a move on its Twitter nemesis.
@BPGlobalPR has been spoofing BP’s public relations operation since mid-May. Its caustic updates reach almost 150,000 Twitter followers. @BP_America, which the real BP has updated sporadically since 2008, has fewer than 15,000.
That’s up from just a couple of thousand a month ago. After a quiet few days in the immediate aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, BP started to engage with its critics on Twitter, and it recently acquired a “verified account” badge.
But BP is still struggling to make itself heard in the Twitterverse, while its evil twin has thrived.
A couple of choice tweets from the mystery campaigner behind @BPGlobalPR:
Safety is our primary concern. Well, profits, then safety. Oh, no- profits, image, then safety, but still- it’s right up there.
OMG This isss ridciulsus. playing a drinking gamee where we drink a shot everytme we seeee an oily birdddd!!! LOL! so wasted!!11 #pbcares
Perhaps BP’s more prominent critics – such as, say, the president of the United States – were of more immediate concern to the oil giant. Perhaps BP didn’t know how to respond to tweets that made even the staunchest environmentalist struggle to stifle a giggle.
But earlier this week, BP finally took the bait. Yesterday, @BPGlobalPR changed its Twitter bio to make plain – if reading its updates had not already done so – that it was “not associated with Beyond Petroleum, the company that has been destroying the Gulf of Mexico for 51 days”.
When we asked Twitter if it knew what had led to the change, the company replied:
BP requested that the account holder be asked to comply with Twitter’s guidelines regarding parody. Twitter subsequently provided the account holder suggestions of best practices that are found on our parody policy page here.
It’s a minor intervention, all things considered. BP could have taken a much more heavy-handed approach; trademark law and other parts of Twitter’s T&Cs could have justified a request to take it down altogether.
But it’s a brave step nonetheless. Already, senior advertising executives are citing a blog post by “Leroy Stick”, the pseudonymous owner of @BPGlobalPR, as social-media gospel, so BP’s response will be closely watched.
Taking his/her name from the tool used to tackle a vicious local dog, Leroy wrote:
The point of this story is that if someone is terrorizing your neighborhood, sometimes it’s alright to grab a stick and take a swing. Social media, and in this particular case Twitter, has given average people like me the ability to use and invent all sorts of brand new sticks.
It remains to be seen whether BP’s modest move will mute @BPGlobalPR, or galvanise more people to pick up sticks against it.
Either way, it has given mainstream media like the FT a reason to write about its most entertaining critic – and opened up yet another front in its long PR war.
