Note: On this blog, sometimes we’ll post more in-depth thinking, and sometimes we’ll just take note of relevant news, events, readings and such. This is the first of that second kind of post.
Leroy Stick, a pseudonym for the twitterer behind @BPGlobalPR, recently released a statement and gave an interview. With more than 140,000 followers, the biting and hilarious @BPGlobalPR has ten times the followers of official BP twitter feed, @BP_America. More after the jump.Stick, who takes his psuedonym from a dog that bullied his childhood neighborhood (“Leroy”) and the method used to stand up to him (“Stick”) writes, “The point of this story is that if someone is terrorizing your neighborhood, sometimes it’s alright to grab a stick and take a swing. Social media, and in this particular case Twitter, has given average people like me the ability to use and invent all sorts of brand new sticks.”
He tells AdAge that he does come up with all the tweets himself. “I have a group of hilarious writers pitching me hundreds of jokes a week. I still write a lot of them, but I’m also an editor in chief/gatekeeper. I don’t think the @BPGlobalPR would have such a wide reach if I were doing all of this on my own. My dad actually wrote the joke about tuna coming pre-packaged in oil which made me very happy.”
Stick says that in one week of selling BP Cares t-shirts, they’ve raised and donated $10,000 to healthygulf.org. He says he’ll keep doing this as long as BP has a PR department.
I expect more strange BP news to continue rolling in all summer. Scott Adam’s explains his desire to buy BP stock thusly:
“invest in the companies that you hate the most.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704025304575285000265955016.html?KEYWORDS=scott+adams
In a rather amusing way, I see a parallel between our (now much discussed and problematized) notion of the content worlds and the dog and stick narrative detailed in the press release.