A Slick PWN
(Pwn (below: Various pronunciations) is a leetspeak slang term derived from the verb “own”, as meaning to appropriate or to conquer to gain ownership. The term implies domination or humiliation of a rival, used primarily in the Internet-based video game culture to taunt an opponent who has just been soundly defeated (e.g., “You just got pwned!”). It was popular among Counter-Strike gamers before spreading through the more general Internet world. The past tense and past participle, pwned, may also be spelled pwnd, pwn’d, pwn3d, pwnt, poned, pawned, or powned. Source: Wikipedia )
Enterprising parodists on May 19 created a Twitter account and feed to mock BP, BPGlobalPR.
Chris Matyszczyk reports (5/26) from CNET,
CNN did contact BP and asked the company whether it might feel its image was being polluted by this rogue global PR force. BP reportedly said it had seen it, but was sure that people would realize it’s not really the company’s work.
Perhaps this underestimates people’s notions of what is and isn’t possible in today’s often ugly, cynical world.
Still, I know there will be sticklers among you who will attempt to invoke Twitter’s fake pages policy. It reads that impersonators “should not be the exact name of the subject of the parody, commentary, or fandom; to make it clearer, you should distinguish the account with a qualifier such as ‘not,’ ‘fake’ or ‘fan.’”
It’s unlikely Twitter will get too picky about this, given that it gets some nice PR (happy to help, as always, chaps) out of it all, and given that BP seems unlikely to complain. BP has made its first wise PR move in allowing this site to gush black humor while the nation’s beaches are threatened by a far more painful darkness.
90,000+ followers, and counting.
Sometime in the next few days, BPGlobalPR’s following will surpass in number BP’s number of employees worldwide.
BP America’s Twitter following? 8,000 or so.
Although the official feed doesn’t offer any black humor, it’s funny in a different way.
