#bpcares

BP Global PR logo for Twitter

BP, the giant energy company, really got some dirt on their hands. A new oil spill in the sea is no surprise. Lots of them happened before: there is a major spill in Nigeria almost every year, but what to do when it is in the backyard of a nation as big as the US?

Well, some public relations would do the trick. It seems like the energy company is the one being tricked. Few weeks after the beginning of the oil spill, a fake twitter account, named BPGlobal PR, has been voicing funny tweets about the spill, such as:

“Please do NOT take or clean any oil you find on the beach. That is the property of British Petroleum and we WILL sue you.”

“Cleaning up oil spills is expensive. Buying judges so we can keep drilling? Relatively cheap.”

No surprise, BP – the real one – has asked Twitter to cancel the account, or to disclaim who is the person or organization, just to avoid confusion with what they’re doing. Yeah, right.

The real BP’s chief executive, Tony Hayward, is really concerned with the situation. Prior to unveil second-quarter financial figures, he has been to a yacht competition, “to stress down”, or buying terms as “oil spill”, “volunteer”, “claims” from search engine providers on the Internet, to draw attention of the public to their recovery in US.

That’s a lot done. They believe helping people to locate themselves on the Internet, is one of their cleaning efforts at the Gulf of Mexico. It would be good to be more proactive on the cleanup, than improving visits at the real BP’s homepage.

Let the public find information naturally, on their own way, will lead, presumably, the Internet users to the real BP’s website site.

Real BP’s amount of money and time spent in building a PR strategy may flounder, just like the leased Horizon rig, now at the bottom of the ocean, precisely, 5000 ft (1500m) below.

I don’t even think this post will be read by Internet users anymore. #bpcares

Vuvuzelastylin'

Kids play with vuvuzela

The World Cup is almost at the end, but I think there is no problem talking about the vuvuzela now.

I am Brazilian, and I am used to the sound of vuvuzela for a long time. In every major or minor competition in the country there is vuvuzela. A friend of mine even drank beer from one, in the Brazil's 1994 World Cup victory.

Vuvuzelas are taking over the world of sports in this World Cup 2010. So many stories, so much controversy, for such a simple device that represents the enthusiasm of a cheerful crowd. I think it’s fun.

Of course there is not just good news about vuvuzelas.

During the world’s largest sport event press, players, and some supporters complained about the noise. All others blow out their vuvuzelas creating a wall of sound that is transmitted to the world via tv broadcast. Ah, there are cases of supporters who got their ears injured and had to be hospitalised, for example, Sven Wipperfurth in West Germany. Or worse, like the South African kid who was shot for blowing the vuvuzela out; in the city of Pamplona, Spain, the council banned the vuvuzela sale at the San Fermin festival (mX News, p.6, Tuesday, July 6, 2010. Melbourne, Australia).

The way the audience manifests itself keeps changing over the years: from ripped paper and singing echoed by supporters, in the seventies, to inflated sticks that are hit together to produce noise, in the first competition of the millennium, in South Korea and Japan.

In South Africa now there is a new way that will go into history forever. It’s like that saying, “say something bad, or something good, but say something about me”. In this World Cup it happened involuntarily. For the better or worse.

News Corp on the unpaid news

It sounds like a corporation that you might have seen in comic books, but News Corp is real, is large, and it’s growing its tentacles everywhere. It’s demanding, too.

The latest about News Corp is that they are going to charge for journalism on the Internet. It started some months ago as the media mogul and Fox network owner, Rupert Murdoch, announced plans to offer paid content to subscribed users. This is already experienced with the London Times and the Wall Street Journal – the latter owned by News Corp. Does it have to be this way?

The public wasn’t the intended user of the internet when it was invented by American computer scientist, Vinton Cerf, in 1973. It was mostly regarded for academics and students, back in that time. It is openly used now by anyone with an available computer and a proper connection. The internet is not owned by any organization in the world.

The internet is very much integrated to everybody’s lives across the world. In one way or another, people would acknowledge that the internet is here to stay. One good fact linked to all of this is that it’s free. It’s enough to pay for technology to connect, and pay the monthly data costs.

Corporations can’t see this from the consumer’s point of view. Journalism is usually a service, either on the internet, or on the TV, radio etc. Publishing news on the internet started as an arm of the news organization’s services, this online service has become a trend, which people usually get for free. Reverse that trend and it becomes complicated.

Not that the music industry hasn’t done this - it has. People are happy to pay for songs. Nevertheless, it is not a trend. There are numerous ways to get songs for free, and internet users will always find songs for free to download.

News Corp and Journalism Online, for example, another business that has similar plans to Rupert Murdoch, need to understand that not everyone is paying for their special news in the future. Someone needs to put this in the news!