Oil spill catharsis: How Twitter has been good for BP

We are emotional creatures. Like it or not, raw emotion affects how we judge things intellectually. Businesses and admen have known and played on this since well before the days of Don Draper. With social media, our emotions are played on in a whole different way when it comes to dealing with corporate image issues. Letting people vent their spleen through channels like Twitter to a large degree defuses people’s anger and bitterness. After all, haven’t you ever been upset and felt better just by talking about the problem? The problem doesn’t go anywhere, but the talking lets off most of the steam.

I’ve been seeing this happen with British Petroleum (BP) on Twitter. If you’re on Twitter, you’ve probably heard of BPGlobalPR. Nope, that isn’t BP’s official PR presence on Twitter, it’s a satirical account started by one enterprising comedian shortly after the gushing oil pipeline catastrophe struck. 

The Tweeter calls himself Terry and has chosen to remain anonymous despite being contacted by major news outlets who want the inside scoop on how this rogue account has chalked up 140,000 followers. Compare that to the just 12,000 of the real BP account, which actually does provide regular informative updates on the crisis. If you add up the retweets and news stories, the scathing tweets by the fake BP representative have reached millions of people eager to point and laugh at the oil giant. 

Though secretive about his identity, the LA Times did get a quote from “Terry,” all the while refusing to break character, about why he’s doing this: "Companies screw up and then they hire folks like me to come in to make it look like they're doing something while they figure out how to make money again," the fake public relations representative wrote. "BP is doing everything we can to save our reputation and hopefully salvage some oil out of all this. We're making a ton of shirts and commercials about how we care, and I cleaned an ugly bird yesterday." For more great quotes, check out the interview with “Terry” on ABC News (never mind the scary monster voice).

Yes, it is an inspiring case of how social media lets a regular Joe go toe-to-toe with a mega-corporation. It’s hardly surprising that satire is successful on Twitter, it’s easier to pack a lot of sting into 140 characters than it is genuine dialogue or detailed explanation. But despite it being a fitting way to stick it to the man, BP may be the one benefiting the most from this Twitter parody. Don’t you feel less angry and anxious to do something after having a laugh at the jokes? It is still an infuriating travesty, but the heated malice toward BP is somewhat tempered, they become more bumbling than evil. BP could well have filed a complaint with Twitter, but they must have realized that would only create more negative PR and instead let people blow off steam. It may be the one good call BP has made in all of this.

Regardless of whether it’s disarming us or not (on the plus side, Terry is selling oil spill T-shirts and giving the proceeds to charity), some of the tweets are just great jokes. Here are my 5 favorite tweets from the rogue BP Twitter account so far:

 

 

 

 

What effect do you see the mock BP Twitter account having? Let us know below. 

Jason Ross is a copywriter for The Duffy Agency. He loves working on both traditional and social media projects and speculating on the future of the ad industry.