The Digitalists

Over the past week, I’ve been following a hilarious Twitter feed called @BPGlobalPR, which may soon overtake @LTrainRat as my favorite parody Twitter account. The person or people behind the feed lampoons not just BP and its response to the Gulf oil spill, but the very notion of PR spin, with tweets such as:

• ANNOUNCEMENT: No one is allowed to look at our oil. All Gulf residents are required to close their eyes until this is over.
• As part of our continued re-branding effort, we are now referring to the spill as “Shell Oil’s Gulf Coast Disaster”. #bpcares
• If we’re being accused of being criminals, we want to be tried by a jury of our peers- wealthy execs who don’t give a damn. #fairisfair

Yesterday, the anonymous tweeter revealed himself … sort of. In a post authored under the (clearly pseudonymous) name “Leroy Stick”, the author explained the motivation behind the feed:

I started @BPGlobalPR, because the oil spill had been going on for almost a month and all BP had to offer were bullshit PR statements.  No solutions, no urgency, no sincerity, no nothing.  That’s why I decided to relate to the public for them ….

Why has this caught on?  I think it’s because people can smell the bullshit and sometimes laughing at it feels better than getting angry or depressed over it.  At the very least, it’s a welcome break from that routine.  The reason @BPGlobalPR continues to grow is because BP continues to spew their bullshit.

But Stick saved his most trenchant criticism for the very idea that companies in crisis should focus on PR:

Do you want to know what BP should do about me?  Do you want to know what their PR strategy should be?  They should fire everyone in their joke of a PR department … and focus on actually fixing the problems at hand ….

The point is, FORGET YOUR BRAND.  You don’t own it because it is literally nothing.  You can spend all sorts of time and money trying to manufacture public opinion, but ultimately, that’s up to the public, now isn’t it?

You know the best way to get the public to respect your brand?  Have a respectable brand.  Offer a great, innovative product and make responsible, ethical business decisions.

It’s very easy for those working in PR (along with many other fields, including marketing and politics) to become so focused on shaping people’s perceptions of something that they become untethered from the underlying reality. Stick offers a useful reminder that good PR should be the end result, not a tactic.

Take one of the most frequently cited crisis responses in the past three decades: the Tylenol poisonings back in 1982. Johnson & Johnson is widely acknowledged to have handled the crisis perfectly, instituting a nationwide recall and agreeing to replace any capsules purchased by customers with solid tablets.

The point is, J&J didn’t respond the way it did because they had smart publicists (though I’m sure they did), or because they were following the rules of Crisis Management 101. They responded that way because the company had a corporate culture that accepted responsibility (even though, unlike the BP oil spill, the disaster was not J&J’s fault) and was led by people whose first priority was keeping the public safe, not avoiding embarrassment or protecting the J&J brand.

Any publicists trying to glean lessons from J&J’s experience should focus not on displaying transparency after disaster strikes, but rather fostering an ethos of transparency long before anything goes wrong. By the time the likes of a @BPGlobalPR come along, it’s already too late, at least in the short term (though it’s never too late to make long-term fixes).

The paradox is that doing the right thing is usually the best PR strategy as well. The single most important thing BP could do to get better press is “plug the damn hole“.