Who's behind GetItRightAlberta.ca? Hill and Knowlton

I couldn't resist writing this up. On Darren Barefoot's blog this morning I found a post on GetItRightAlberta.ca, a "grassroots" lobby that wants Alberta's oil royalties to stay the same.

The Get It Right Alberta website. The slick design and stock photos are the first sign that this isn't part of a real grassroots campaign.

(For those not familiar with Alberta politics: we have a lot of oil, most of it locked up in oil sands. Our royalty structure--what the government charges oil companies who want to extract that oil--was set when oil was $11 a barrel. A review panel recently concluded those royalties should be raised, giving the province as much as $2 billion more per year in revenue. Oil companies, which have been earning record profits from this oil, are apoplectic.)

It looks like the PR firm Hill and Knowlton is behind the campaign. Dave Cournoyer discovered this by doing a WHOIS lookup on GetItRightAlberta.ca.

This is isn't exactly new territory for Hill and Knowlton. As Darren notes: "This is the same company that's advocated for tobacco, the first war in Iraq, and Scientology over the years. They have a long history of underhanded tactics."

But my immediate reaction was this: If you're in the H&K astroturfing department, why would you enter your own information including your corporate email address when you registered the domain for your fake lobby group? Because you don't know that WHOIS data is public.

The oil companies, or whoever is paying H&K, should think about that for a minute. Because that's a sign of incompetence.

Update: Well, maybe that was a bit harsh. Brendan from Hill & Knowlton posted some comments over here that explain their position in more detail. Specifically:

Secondly, and while some may argue that our registration of the URL under H&K’s name is a sign of incompetence, they can rest assured that we are not that dumb and purposely registered the URL in the name of H&K to address this specific issue. This speaks to key social media principles that we will always disclose who we are and who we are working for (both our agency and our client), and that we will not pretend to be someone or something we are not.

Fair enough. I take back my comment about incompetence (though I've worked with a lot of PR people who are surprised to learn about WHOIS). Brendan also posted a link to the story Oil money aids campaign website, which includes this line: "But the organizers won't say which groups or individuals are behind their efforts, nor will they say who is paying the bills."

So if we're following those key social media principles, shouldn't H&K have its name on the website? And shouldn't the client(s) be mentioned too? It seems like a significant effort is being made to disguise the players involved. And ultimately that undermines the credibility of the campaign.

Let's be clear: I don't work for the oil and gas industry, but I'm open to hearing their perspective. And like any other citizen, I'd be concerned about job loss and other economic impacts from a royalty change.

But I'm also concerned about corporations using back-door tactics to influence important political decisions. Even if that's not the case here, the lack of transparency on the website implies that it is. And obviously, H&K's reputation is working against them here.