by Fast Company

g

Six months after the BP oil spill, it’s clear that in the age of social media, a company can’t spin and rebrand its way out of a mess like it used to.

Activists have donned suits in mockery at least since 1967, when Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies tossed dollar bills onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. More recently, the Billionaires for Bush bird-dogged the RNC, and the Yes Men, a pair of pseudonymous activist-pranksters, starred in two documentaries in which they impersonate reps from Halliburton, the WTO, and Dow Chemical. (Stick shares a lecture agent with the Yes Men and calls them "rock stars.")

These days, venting anti-corporate anger is as easy as retweeting a joke, Photoshopping a parodic BP logo with an asphyxiating sea turtle, or creating a YouTube video called "BP Spills Coffee" (which has tallied more than 10 million views). Satire can help hold the powerful accountable when the public's attention threatens to wane. "It really comes down to storytelling — if you don't tell your story well, someone else will tell it for you," says sustainability expert Joel Makower, executive editor of GreenBiz.com. "BP is an example of how companies' misfortunes are going to unfold going forward with all the tools and weapons the Internet and social media afford."

BP presented a burlesque of corporate hypocrisy that not even Hoffman could have conjured: The oil company with the worst safety and environmental record of the Big Six is also the author of "Beyond Petroleum," one of the most successful green-rebranding campaigns ever seen. The real problem here was not that BP made PR mistakes; it was that their PR was too good. "Companies screw themselves when they let perception get ahead of reality," Makower says. "BP did a fabulous job with 'Beyond Petroleum,' but less than 1% of their revenue has ever come from renewables."

Read the Article >>

photo credit: derek b