TERRY’S TWTRCON SPEECH by the @BPGlobalPR team

Terry from BPGlobalPR got a chance to talk at  TWTRCON 2010 earlier today.  Check out his speech below:

Good afternoon.

I’d like to start by reminding everyone that by being in this room you have signed a non-disclosure agreement with BP.  You may not share any of my words, you may not take any tasteless photos and if you say anything bad about BP anytime, anywhere.  We will capture you.

Ok, enough with the serious stuff!  I’ve gotta say, I feel right at home here at TWTRCON.  Reminds me of my office.  Just a bunch of people with made up job titles acting like they know what they’re doing.  Great environment for me.

Alright, this is TWTRCON so we might as well get right to it.  If you want to make it big on Twitter, you need to start by destroying the Gulf of Mexico.  If you can’t do that, go to the old standby and just throw some money at it.  So I guess that’s our secret, anger the entire world and then have a lot of money.  That’s what we did.

Why did we start BPGlobalPR?  We started BPGlobalPR because people were getting mad about the oil spill in the gulf and a lot of those people (the greenies) were blaming BP for the mess.  We knew we had to manage the bad press, so we thought, hey, let’s start a twitter account!   Now, do I know the first thing about twitter?  No.  Nothing.  I spent the entire first week trying to sign up for twitter.corn.  Which is not a site, by the way.  Alas, we made it.

Our main mission with the twitter account is/was/and will always be to distract people from the mess.  You know, keep their brains too busy for any thinking.  The Internet is full of great information, essays and ideas.   But no one is interested in that hogwash, people want to see photos of cats wearing wigs.  That’s what gets the attention, that’s what distracts.  Our aim is to be that cat in a wig.

“Oh, BP doesn’t let their employees wear the respirators they definitely need because it looks bad in photographs”

-  Have a look at this cat in a wig.

“Oh, look, here’s a photo of a bird covered in oil.”

- This cat in a wig isn’t covered in oil.

“Oh, BP is pumping millions of gallons of dispersant into the ocean.  Dispersant that is known to be toxic and serves no real purpose except making the ocean’s surface look slightly better.  Dispersant that’s actually thinned out the oil making it impossible to capture with booms.  Dispersant that we’ve been told to quit using, but we’re using anyways.”

-  Here’s a sassy cat wearing a wig.

Do you see how that works?  We’re not solving problems, we’re just directing the attention.  And isn’t that what twitter is all about.  Getting attention?

The problem is, if you’re a company or if you’re trying to advertise something, you can’t make people follow you.  This isn’t the TV, where we force people to sit and listen to your crap during a Real Terrible Housewives show commercial break.

You can’t sell stuff on twitter, cause no one likes ads.  If you’re gonna tweet you’ve gotta have something to say or some sort of purpose.  Hell even when we sell the t-shirts we throw in tidbits of info, like we’re dumping these in the ocean now, so start buying em.

You gotta connect with the people.  Twitter is a jungle.  One minute you’re an idiot in your underpants trying to get laid, the next minute you’re speaking at TWTRCON scheduling a boat ride with THE Martha Stewart.  So I guess in conclusion, in order to be good at twitter, ah hell, I have no idea.  Here’s a cat in a wig.

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