“We took a chance on bending the rules a bit on our experiemental deep water drilling platform and kinda got caught. What’s the big deal? Give us an A for effort? C’mon, everybody makes mistakes!”
These are the types of musings that have been entertaining more than 137,000 people on Twitter and millions more on ABC News, CNN, USAToday, Wall Street Journal and more. Using a fake account, the twitter handle of @BPGlobalPR has been tweeting over-the-top posts that poke fun at BP’s CEO Tony Hayward, his wife and other leutenants at BP as a way to bring attention to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
In contrast, the BP corporate twitter handle has 12,000+ followers and is following 51 people. How did this happen?
Why would an oil behemoth like BP think they would have to engage through social media in any meaningful way? In fact why would an electric company, pharmaceutical company, semiconductor company, etc have to worry about developing a social strategy? This event and @BPGlobalPR should be a wake up call to every company who produces anything. Some event will happen at some point and your company will get overrun if you are not prepared.
What should you do, you ask? Well, that’s what we asked this week’s moderator Gavin Heaton to work through on this week’s chat. Gavin gets my bid for two awards this week. He wins for coolest handle: @ServantofChaos and moderates at the oddest local time yet (2am his local time in Australia). Coolness aside, Gavin brings years of experience in digital marketing and strategy development and has proven to be a goto person for Brands of all types. Our topic and questions this week will be:
Topic: Crisis Management for BP Using Social Media
Q1: How has @BPGlobalPR affected perception and should they have shut it down?
Q2: How is BP using social media to address the situation and what should they do better?
Q3: What can other companies learn from this about managing a crisis & the impact of social media?
The event will begin with Q1 at noon eastern followed every 20 minutes with the next questions. To follow along and add your POV simply track #sm63 via any Twitter client or follow along via our LIVE page.
The first quarter of 2009 was riddled with vexing corporate issues. Earnings are challenged along with everything else in this economy and Brands of all shapes are getting hammered for their mishaps. Social media is exacerbating those mishaps and creating urgency in PR and communications departments worldwide. 
