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.

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.

ZLRIGNITION has promoted Nick Grant and Sara Horstmann to Account Manager.

Grant joined ZLRIGNITION in 2007 as an account- and street marketing coordinator and has played a vital role in managing special events and activities for Just Eliminate Lies, (JEL), Iowa’s teen-led tobacco counter marketing group.

A native of Washington, D.C., Grant holds a bachelor’s degree in advertising from Drake University, where he also was co-captain of Drake’s 2006-2007 men’s basketball team.

“Nick will continue to play a critical role in helping our clients’ engage teens and young adults, and in utilizing social media to help clients achieve their communications and marketing objectives,” says Louie Laurent, president and CEO.

Horstmann joined ZLRIGNITION in 2008 as a media planner and buyer. Before joining the agency, Horstmann worked at Heartland Financial USA, Inc. where she coordinated major marketing projects including special events and media buying.

“Sara brings a sharp focus on producing results that meet or exceed client expectations. She is a valuable addition to our account service team,” adds Laurent.

Horstmann, who resides in Urbandale, holds a bachelor’s degree in art & design from Iowa State University.

Every few days we hear of another newspaper or magazine shutting down. The Rocky Mountain News and Country Home magazine are a couple recent examples.  It’s sad to see the shakeout that is occurring in the mainstream media. But it would be a mistake for marketers to believe that the landscape shrinks their opportunities to tell a good story.

Shakespeare’s famous line, “All the world’s a stage” is a pretty fitting description of today’s journalism. There are millions more “editors” now than ever before. You won’t find them in a newsroom. They’re sitting in front of a laptop writing blogs, creating Facebook pages, uploading video on YouTube. Some are exchanging tweets. They can propel your business, they can ignore it, or they can sink it.

You need to find and feed these new journalists because your competitors certainly will.

Here are four key steps to building a successful online PR program.

• Conduct a search for blogs that may cover your industry or reach your target audience. blogsearch.google.com is an excellent place to start looking.
• Search for groups that may have an interest in your subject on Linkedin and Facebook.
• Research the sites that you find through your searches or friends’ recommendations. Understand the point of view of the writer.
• Once you find these new journalists, don’t try to force feed them. Blogs and social networking media should stimulate dialogue, not diatribe. You’re there to contribute to the discussion.

So, give a moment of silence to the Rocky Mountain News, Country Home and other media casualties.  Then build a plan to reach the millions of online “editors” who have taken their place.