The following is reblogging Bud Caddell’s post on What Consumes Me
It is officially Day 52 since the BP oil spill began in the gulf of Mexico.
Somewhere between 12,000 to 25,000 barrels of oil have been escaping into the ocean per day.
That’s 600,000 to 1.3 Million barrels of oil released total. So far.
Look at the cup sitting on your desk (or imagine one being there). Fill that cup 874 million times.
I don’t question that BP is attempting to solve the problem.
And I offer my sincere condolences to the families of the workers lost in the original accident.
I grew up playing in the waters of the Gulf.
I spend most of my days now, playing on the internet.
And because of that, I believe that BP should be solely focused on minimizing the already assured catastrophe – stopping the oil first and foremost – and not buying Adwords or worrying about Twitter.
In my opinion, BP should dispatch their PR & legal departments, donned in polyvinyl dungarees, to clean up the shoreline or preserve wildlife instead of conduct business as usual – spinning facts and covering their backsides.
You’re free to disagree. These are my opinions.
I asked myself, what do you do in the age of Twitter to protest … or give tangible voice to your beliefs?
I think @BPGlobalPR is one way. A brilliant way, actually. And Twitter deserves credit for not giving into the demands of a multi-national corporation, with legions of lawyers, and for not shutting down the account.
And I think there’s another way to protest directly to BP. And I’ve started it – but I need your help.
I’ve created a single Twitter account that, every hour on the hour, sends an @ reply to @bp_america – BP’s official Twitter account.
An example tweet the account sends – STOP THE OIL STOP THE SPIN @BP_America
Creating the account, powering it, and scheduling it was all pretty easy – and I’m going to show you how to do it yourself.
To me, this is the equivalent of holding a sign outside of their offices. And if there are enough of us, it will make using Twitter very difficult for the brand – their @replies will fill up with our message – assuming enough people join me or use my method and do something even more interesting with it.
How to set up your own protest account in 5 steps:
- Create a new Twitter account at Twitter.com
- Download the PHP file I’ve uploaded here
- Edit the file (in a text editor) to input the name of your account and the password to the account (that’s all you have to change)
- Upload the file to your webserver (make sure to give it full read/execute permissions – 755)
- Here’s the complicated bit – create a cron job that runs the file every hour on the hour (a cron job is simply a way to tell your webserver to run a file periodically without you having to do it yourself). You should be able to find how to do this for your hosting service in their help files or in your control panel. Once you find the admin, in the command field, just enter ‘php’ before the URL of the file on your server and set the job to run once an hour.
It will take a handful of us doing this together to have an impact – so please, if you agree, help out and get an account running.
