[David Strom's Web Informant] 12 July 2010: The latest in PR hoaxes

[David Strom]

Web Informant 12 July 2010: The latest in PR hoaxes

We've had a couple of notable public relations pranks in the past
month, playing heavily off phony Twitter accounts that were used to
lampoon some stodgy situations. Expect more as media hoaxsters start
sharpening their tools and coordinating their satirical repertoire.

The two phony Twitter accounts, @ATT_Wireless_PR and @BPglobalPR, were
created in mid June and early May in response to the iPhone v4
problems and the Gulf oil spill respectively. The BR account has
gotten more than 185,000 followers and been featured on numerous blogs
and news reports, and its owner even has this post that gives his (or
her) rationale:
http://streetgiant.com/2010/06/02/leroy-stick-the-man-behind-bpglobalpr/

Wired and Cnet both tried to reveal the "real" person behind the
account, who goes by the name Leroy Stick, but actually fingered the
wrong person.  So much for good journalist practice. Stick also sells
fake BP t-shirts (with an oil leak-modified BP logo), the proceeds of
which he claims to have donated to a charity.  Or so he says.

One of my favorite posts from the AT&T account is this message:
Deny, deny, patronize, condescend. Classic! Steve Jobs - you had us at hello

Certainly, these phony PR accounts wouldn't have gotten any traction
had BP (and to some extent Apple and AT&T) owned up to their problems
early on and not immediately shifted into denial mode.  But they are
amusing to read, if slightly NSFW.

Twitter really helps these sorts of pranks. One of my favorite
old-time media hoaxsters is Joey Skaggs, who has made a quirky but
continuous living poking fun of the media and how easy it is to gain
their trust, even on the most foolish of premises. Skaggs has been
behind a virtual reality sex product, a Korean company buying wayward
dogs from animal shelters for food, and a computerized legal arbiter,
just to name a few of his projects. Skaggs in disguise has been
interviewed on CNN and major TV networks as his self-purported
"expert" only to come clean weeks later and reveal the gag.  You can
see his blog at artoftheprank.com where he posts some of the more
notable media pranks of others.

He told me: "Social networking has evolved to where it is now easy for
everyone to be a prankster and make social commentary. People get a
laugh and it's pretty harmless. And yes, I think we'll see more and
more of this as it's so simple to do. No risk, very little challenge
and, although amusing, not much in the way of provocation or new
ideas."

Besides Skaggs, another of the more notable media pranksters is
ImprovEverywhere, a NYC-based acting troupe that stages all sorts of
oddball events. Their latest was a command performance at the main New
York Public Library Rose Reading room a few weeks ago. The library
asked IE to play off one scene from the movie Ghostbusters and came
with actors dressed both as the stars in the film and ghosts. Of
course, part of their work is to document the pranks with video and
they are very amusing. In the past, IE has taken over Best Buy stores
with actors dressed in blue polo shirts posing as store customer
service clerks, a special "tourists only" walking lane on New York
City sidewalks and precisely choreographed meet ups. You can see more
on their blog here: improveverywhere.com

So what can we learn from all this tomfoolery? Branding is now
completely crowd-sourced. Any attempt to control the message is so
last year. Get on board this cluetrain before it departs the station
for good, as BP found out.

While anonymous tweets are powerful, they can be used for both good
and evil purposes, and often a fine line separates them. And while
Twitter Inc. has done some policing of fake accounts that are harmful,
don't expect them to intercede on your behalf when satire is involved.

Finally, satire is still alive and well in the new medium of social
media. But it also is getting more difficult to separate truth from
fiction. And while the BP and AT&T tweets are amusing, they can get in
the way of finding out what is really going on with both companies.

You can listen to a podcast that Paul Gillin and I have recorded on
this topic that will be posted on MediaBlather.com later this week.

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