Fake BP Twitter Account A PR Nightmare

By Ben Haber

On May 19th the first tweet was posted: “We regretfully admit that something has happened off of the Gulf Coast. More to come.”

Then about 10 minutes later came the second tweet: “Adorable! Naughty Kitty Makes a Mess! www.youtube.com/watch?v=greOQOD6GDA”

And 20 minutes later another: “Think about it this way, the ocean is like rootbeer and oil is like ice cream. We just made America a giant rootbeer float!”

Even though the Twitter account handle account is labeled BPGlobalPR the content being posted during the past 6-7 days has been a nightmare for BP’s actual PR team. Someone (who is clearly having fun) decided to mock BP’s poor handling of the oil spill with witty one-liners such as, “Jesus walked on water and soon you can too! (Please pray for BP, we’re losing a lot of oil).”

The account has become quite popular – attracting over 25,000 followers in this short time, more than double the number of followers for BP’s official corporate Twitter account and Twitter account covering the oil spill combine. Even more scary for BP is the amount of re-tweets this fake account is getting, which is what’s driving it’s visibility.

This situation provides other companies with an idea of how social media can be used against them during an ugly situation. Quick, honest responses can do a lot in image control and management, which BP is now learning about first hand.

11 comments May 25th, 2010

Ann Curry’s Commencement Address #Fail

By Ben Haber

Over the weekend NBC’s Ann Curry was the keynote speaker during Wheaton College’s commencement ceremony. In an effort to personalize her address, Ann began her speech by listing some famous graduates from the college. Unfortunately, most of the people she listed graduated from the Wheaton College in Illinois, not the Wheaton College in Massachusetts (where she was speaking).

As a Wheaton College alumni I took particular interest in this story, as I received real-time updates from friends on Facebook that were in attendance.

The video and transcript of Curry’s speech were quickly edited so that they didn’t provide inaccurate information, but the damage was already done. Something that could have taken a fact-checker two minutes to do turned into a laughable story reported by USA Today, Boston Globe, various blogs such as Gawker,  and other news outlets. If only the video was available, Curry could have had a real YouTube gem.

To her credit, Curry admitted to her mistake, saying that she was mortified by the mishap and was only trying to connect with the students.

5 comments May 25th, 2010