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Tuesday, June 8, 2010
News / Biz Not_BP's Tweets
Posted By Rhiannon Fionn-Bowman on Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 10:36 AM
Those of you familiar with Twitter know it's not uncommon for an average Joe to pose as a celebrity online, so it should come as no surprise that BP's public relation's department also has a parody account sending out messages like this gem:
By the way, we made it so if you google image search "oil spill" or "bp" you'll see some great celeb sideboob pics. #bpcares
And this one:
We take this situation very seriously, which is why tonight's oil wrestling event will be followed by a candle light vigil.
And this one:
Money can't buy happiness. But Tony Hayward did buy a giant yacht he calls 'Happiness'. It has a frickin' helicopter pad on it!
The faux Twitter account, BPGlobalPR, claims its mission is to "get BP's message and mission statement out into the twitterverse!" Currently, the account has nearly 140,000 followers. BP's actual public relation's Twitter feed, BP_America, has just over 12,000 followers.
Read more about the parody account from The New York Times:
The parody site is updated throughout the day, offering a combination of “everything is going exactly according to plan” P.R. speak, macabre humor and occasional glimpses of genuine outrage.Over the last week, BPGlobalPR boasted of a deal on “blackened shrimp” at BP gas stations, linked to the photographs of oil-soaked pelicans with the out-of-character postscript “warning: truly heartbreaking” and spoke of how “we’ve modestly made modest changes to this modest gulf.”
Beyond its followers, BPGlobalPR benefits from retweeting, becoming grist for other Twitter feeds. On Saturday, this cynical packet — “Safety is our primary concern. Well, profits, then safety. Oh, no — profits, image, then safety, but still — it’s right up there” — was bounding its way across the Internet.
Read the rest of this article, by Noam Cohen, here.
Further reading: BP Buys 'Oil' Search Terms to Redirect Users to Official Company Website -- ABC.com
The fake account has even made CNN:
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