June 2nd, 2010

How Twitter Did to BP What BP Did to the Environment

As you know well, BP had an accident in the Gulf of Mexico back in late April and since then has been spilling about 12,000 to 25,000 barrels of oil in a day. It’s easily the worst oil-related disaster in history, surpassing Exxon Valdez disaster of 1989. But an expected outcome of British Petroleum’s black-eye on the environment? The black-eye on the gas giant’s own brand, as delivered in blows by the Twitterati.

In addition to suffering dropping stock prices—their stock dropped from above $60 in April to the $35 range in a matter of weeks—and 11 deaths caused by the initial explosion which resulted in the spill, BP is finding its billionaire power-player status is no match for the savvy of fed-up Twitter users.

By common logic, BP is a multibillion dollar corporation. They should be impervious to outbursts like this. In fact, if you had told BP execs a year ago that they would have to worry about public opinion in the form of iPhone toting teenagers, they would have cackled in your face. But they weren’t prepared—nor could they have been—for the wrath of Twitter. Twitter users have really come together to blacken the eye of their enemy here. And you really have to hand it to them for creativity and resourcefulness.

    - Most notably, @BPGlobalPR has led the BP rebranding campaign. In addition to gems like this tweet:

    As part of our continued re-branding effort, we are now referring to the spill as “Shell Oil’s Gulf Coast Disaster”

    the fake Twitter account has also popularized the hashtag #BPcares and the outbursts of @BPTerry—the lead publicist for the Twitter account.


    - Last week, BP’s own Twitter account—which has 9,215 followers while @BPGlobalPR enjoys over 100,000 followers—was hacked with Tweets that were akin to what one might find on @BPGlobalPR.

But the last thing that comes to mind on the Twitter front is the flash-mob aspect. I was walking home from work last week, and sure enough, there were about 500 hipsters, many of whom were soaked in what looked like oil, surrounding a BP down by Houston and Lafayette Streets. They effectively shut it down. This is a pretty powerful tactic, effectively cutting of their income at the pump. Later, I came to find out that the whole thing had been organized on, you guessed it: Twitter.

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Posted in Internet in the world, Social Media, Technology Tags: , ,
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