Americans love parody. If they didn’t Saturday Night Live wouldn’t have survived a single season on TV, let alone 30.

Nearly everyone who watches the program clearly understands the skits are designed to get laughs by poking fun at newsmakers often by stretching the truth. On social networking sites, however, the jokes are not always so obvious.

Twitter and Facebook have guidelines for posts that are intended to poke fun at newsmakers. But they’re not always followed. Here’s a recent example of a Twitter parody account, @bpglobalpr that takes aim at British Petroleum:

Twitter’s guidelines recognize that parody is a legitimate form of speech. That’s why Twitter has stated that people who open ”fake” accounts should clearly indicate that in the page name. In this case, “fakebp,” or “notbp.”

From the heading and the logo below (in case you didn’t notice it has dripping oil) a reader could easily get the impression this is really BP’s pubic relations site. As of May 26, this fake site had drawn almost 44,000 followers.

While BP may be a sitting duck for Social Sabotage, don’t think for a moment your organization is immune. Check the social sites daily to see if your brand and your company are being misrepresened. Report fake Twitter or Facebook pages immediately.

Or if you want to engage in parody, remember there’s little body language in 140 characters of text. So make your intentions clear.

There has been a lot said and written about BP’s public relations performance in the aftermath of the Gulf oil disaster.  Frankly, it’s premature to cast a verdict.

Oil from the Gulf of Mexico disaster floats ashore in Venice, La.

To the company’s credit, BP came out immediately to accept responsibility for the cleanup and made its CEO and other company experts available to the media whenever the media wanted answers.

BP also deserves high marks for its use of the social media space. The company set up a designated section on its Website to provide regular updates, photos and videos of its personnel explaining the actions it was taking to slow the leak on the Gulf floor, and the steps it was taking to reimburse fishermen, business owners and their employees who were facing economic losses as a result of the spill. The company also provided up-to-the-minute updates through Twitter and asked for the public to report any sightings of oil that had washed ashore.

There were also some missteps, particularly early on. BP’s miscalculation of the amount of oil spilling into the Gulf may have cost the company some credibility. There was also a battle played out in front of television cameras in which BP tried to shift some of the blame to Transocean, the company that owned the oil platform. While it’s true Transocean owned the platform, it was BP’s oil that was spilling into the Gulf. It would have been far better from a communications standpoint for BP to accept full responsibility and settle any recriminations with Transocean behind closed doors.

How BP’s reputation will fare long-term will depend more on what the company does from here on out. How fast can the leaking well be plugged? How well does the company handle the cleanup of the Gulf and the protection of the Gulf Coast ecosystem? And most importantly, will the businesses, their employees and property owners receive fair compensation for their losses?

Only when all those questions are resolved should the company’s crisis communications be put to a verdict.

What company doesn’t have a Facebook page, a Twitter account or even a YouTube Channel? All of these can be great vehicles for conversing with customers and prospects and for building brands. They also offer easy platforms for those who want to sabotage your organization – current or former employees, disgruntled customers or people who simply want to tear down your company’s reputation.

Perhaps the most famous case was the YouTube video that showed employees at a Domino’s Pizza store in North Carolina doing some disgusting, explicit things in the kitchen. The openness of social media offers an easy ticket for social sabotage.

Your identity can be hijacked by a bogus Facebook profile. Comments posted in jest on a blog or in a Tweet could be easily be misunderstood to the detriment of your reputation. Or a disgrunted employee or customer could go on a profanity-laced tirade against you, your company or your product.

So what do you do when it happens to you?

1.   Monitor the social media space. There are online services that aggregate social media mentions of your company, people and products in real time — Technorati and Radian6, for example. Monitor those several times a day. Check your own Facebook pages, fan pages, blogs and YouTube Channels as well.

2. Delete offensive, explicit posts immediately and report them. If offensive material shows up on your Facebook page, delete it immediately and report the offender.  Each site has links to report fraudulent, offensive or abusive behavior. In the case of someone passing himself off as someone else, report it to the social media site immediately. You will likely have to block all posts from that profile until Facebook can remove the profile (and that’s a subject for another time).

3. In the case of false or explicit posts on another organization’s social media sites that are damaging to you or your business, contact the site owner and insist the offensive or false information be removed immediately. If necessary, contact your attorney. Libel laws provide the same protection to people defamed on blogs as they provide to people defamed by the New York Times.

Fixing social sabotage consumed Domino’s for weeks. The offending employees were fired and charged with felonies for adulterating food. Domino’s president posted a new video issuing a public apology for what happened and tried to reassure consumers that similar acts weren’t occurring at other Dominos stores. He also shut the restaurant down for several days and brought in a crew to sanitize it from top to bottom in full view of local TV cameras.

ZLRIGNITION and two clients have been honored by the Central Iowa Chapter of the Public Relations Society of American for work the agency performed in 2009.

The agency and Iowa Public Radio earned a Public Relations Mark of Excellence (PRIME) award of merit for the network’s 2009 Annual Report: Enhancing Connections. The award was the top honor presented in its category.

ZLRIGNITION and the Iowa Department of Human Services won a an Award of Merit for Cover the Kids Day. The program mobilized more than 1,500 churches throughout Iowa to help spread awareness of the hawk-i health insurance program for children. It contributed to nearly 30,000 calls to the DHS and the submission of 69,000 applications for enrollment in hawk-i and Medicaid from October through December 2009.

There continues to be dialog about social media versus traditional media and how social replaces traditional…at least that’s from people who make their living with social media. Traditional media advocates are silent in fear of being labeled “old school.”

We think it’s the wrong argument. We think that social media has much more in common with traditional media than the new gurus would have you believe.

The key difference is the fact that two way communication can be much more powerful for good or bad. A bad magazine ad wastes money. A bad discourse between a brand and it’s social following can destroy the brand.

We’ve all seen companies who rush to Facebook or Twitter effort does nothing more than pimp product or company information. It’s amazing to us how the appreciation for the audience’s interests is ignored for self interest. More, they intrude on a space reserved for “friends.” Not for long though, the ignore button is easier than a DVRing past commercials. These efforts usually have few fans and most of the fans they have will be already connected with the organization sponsoring the effort.

The discussion between social media and traditional media should really be about how to integrate the two and magnify the effectiveness of each. At what stage of affinity does social media really kick into the equation? Does it happen at the awareness phase? Or, closer to the “I’ve bought and I love/hate it phase?” Which media is better at which point of affinity?

If you have a product that has caught fire and your customers can’t wait to tell others about it, social media can create awareness and demand. If you have a product that is a hard to love necessity of life, not so much.

If you’re struggling with the argument of social media versus traditional, take a moment and create a scale that goes from totally unaware to loyal customer. Ask yourself which media strategy makes sense at what point of the continuum? How do you move a prospect from totally unaware to in love of your product? Then make it all work together by connecting the dots between all the options you have on the table.

If you do that rather than rushing into ineffectiveness, you’ll have a cohesive plan that makes the most of your marketing dollar.