Novelty Social Networking Accounts

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About

Social networking has become a big part of our culture. There are very few people these days don’t have a Twitter, Facebook, or Myspace.

And like anything that becomes popular, people learn to have a little fun with it. What better way to have fun with the life status updates of Twitter than to do them in character.

People make a social networking profile account for a fictional character, and keep it updated with in character / in universe tweets.

This is much more than just creating a profile and using a characters name, these people have to be committed in order to pull this off. As such, many of these Twitter accounts end up eventually abandoned.

In order to make their fictional presence more believable, many Fictional Character accounts follow/friend others from within their own fictional universe.

As An Advertising Tool

Some companies will make (and sometimes maintain) a profile for a fictional character to hype or promote something. Take the Youtube account of the fictional band from Left 4 Dead 2, the Midnight Riders. The account was made to show off the bands music and hype Left 4 Dead 2.

It can be described as kind of a web based performance art.

Examples:

Twitter

Video Game Characters

-The RED Heavy Weapons Guy (Team Fortress 2)
-The RED Scout (Team Fortress 2)
-The BLU Engineer (Team Fortress 2)
-The BLU Pyro (Team Fortress 2)

-Ellis (Left 4 Dead 2)
-Rochelle (Left 4 Dead 2)
-Nick (Left 4 Dead 2)
-Coach (Left 4 Dead 2)

-G Man (Half Life)
-Barney Calhoun (Half Life)
-Dr. Kleiner (Half Life 2)

-Chell (Portal)
-GLaDOS__ (Portal)

-Tifa Lockhart (Final Fantasy VII)

TV Characters

-Jack Carter (Eureka)
-Hugo ‘Hurley’ Reyes (Lost)

As Critique

The account BPGlobalPR^[1] made its first tweet on May 19th, 2010 in response to the previous month’s oil spill in the gulf of Mexico.

The tweets were made by a character named Terry, a fictional member of BP’s PR team. It was used to critique BP’s response to the spill and to channel people’s frustration with how the company was handling it. Created by comedian Josh Simpson, he felt that BP was more concerned with their image than with actually improving the situation.^[2] The account was run by up to 15 people, but manned by Simpson. After being retweeted by Roger Ebert, @BPGlobalPR gained national attention from The New York Times^[3], Advertising Age^[4], and the Los Angeles Times.^[5] Simpson did an in-character interview with Mashable^[6] and published an article on how to correctly handle a PR disaster in the Guardian.^[7]

Several other Global PR accounts followed including UNGlobalPR^[8], IsraelGlobalPR^[9], and USAGlobalPR^[10], but none have come close to BP’s 160,000+ follower count.

External References