BP Criticized for Everything…Except Social Media?
It’s no surprise to anyone who has seen a news headline in the past month that British Petroleum has now unleashed the worst environmental disaster in American history. It is a tragic, now political event of truly epic proportions. And while there are very few who would stand in defense of the company right now, Patrick Barbanes over at SocialMediaToday argues that BP actually is getting one thing right: social media.
It started on May 19th when someone created a parody twitter account called BP Public Relations. Here are just a few of the tweets:
Then, a spokesman for BP, Toby Odone, responded by saying:
I’m not aware of whether BP has made any calls to have it taken down or addressed. People are entitled to their views on what we’re doing and we have to live with those. We are doing the best we can to deal with the current situation and to try to stop the oil from flowing and to then clean it up…People are frustrated at what’s happening, as are we, and that’s just their way of expressing it.
Barbanes says this is an exemplary reaction, admitting that most companies have no idea how to respond to biting attacks via social media. Barbanes says, “That is about one of the HEALTHIEST and most enlightened responses I’ve ever read from a corporate spokesperson about a parody of their company.” And while Barbanes scoffs as the suggestion that a company should embrace these kinds of fake accounts by exposing them as false and then highlighting the real account, does it help more for the company to condone the outlash?
BP’s response might seem so ahead-of-the-curve, though, only because of its unique position at the moment. All eyes are on the company. So while their decisions seem brilliantly sympathetic to the lives they have affected, it might not be a blueprint to follow for other companies. The moral of the story here might be that it’s too soon to tell how exactly a company can effectively respond to parodies, but we should be taking notes nonetheless.
This is bad especially when Obama is in the process of trying to get offshore drilling approved.