In true overdramatic-parent style, I must confess to occasionally pulling out the ‘I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed’ reprimand when my five year old plays up. It’s a tried and tested disciplining method that not only tells her when she’s done wrong, but in a clipped, scathing way. No wasted words. No pulled punches.

Now, on to the reason for this blog.

Many of you will have seen the very, very funny and brilliantly caustic Twitter profile for Shippam’s Paste earlier this week – a brand I literally knew nothing about.

If you didn’t see it, the account was confirmed as a fake by Shippam’s PR team and featured a social media intern called Ben. He told us that he was trying to promote Shippam’s Paste by inspiring engagement.

Here are a few tweets just to give you a taste of what joy Ben was providing us with:

As fellow blogger Dan Leahul said here on The Wall Blog:

“The account is clearly having a laugh at the marketing industry and its need for brands to have a digital media strategy, no matter how established or tedious, like crab paste, the brand may be.”

Well, today, a blog I wrote, going as far as to name Shippam’s in my Good PR roundup of the week, went live. I tweeted a link to it, stating that I’d included @ShippamsPaste in the column. I’d said in the blog how I was impressed that the company must have known about the account, as their PR team denounced it as a fake, yet were still allowing it, ‘rather than kicking off and going the legal route other companies would’.

Although I knew that I had written the profile name right, I clicked on it, you know, just to make sure. And to my absolute horror, I got a ‘user does not exist’ message back.

So I did a quick Twitter search.

As I thought, I’d spelled it correctly. It’s just that the account had been removed. Official Xbox 360 Magazine writer Matt Lees responded to a tweet of mine saying it had gone to say it had been suspended for impersonation, and that he knew the person behind it.

I was tweeted by Steve Lee with a link to a new and seemingly official Shippam’s account, @ShippamsOfficia, which had two or three dull tweets already sitting ugly on their timeline.

The account has since been deleted, hopefully as somebody there realised that nobody actually cares about the paste. Users followed the first account because they liked the tone. In fact, by creating an official profile, all Shippam’s did is prove the point made above that brands feel that they need a digital strategy, no matter how established or tedious they are.

I’ve sent a few questions to the original account creator, which I’ll post here shortly if and when I receive answers to them, but in the meantime; Shippam’s, if you read this:

I’m not angry, I’m just really disappointed.

UPDATE

I’ve heard back from the creator (who hasn’t specifically asked to stay anonymous, but it’s probably for the best that they do).

Although the answers are very brief, it’s clear that they’re fairly relaxed about the whole affair.

For a start, they responded that they thought it was ‘fair enough, really’ that the account was suspended.

They answered that – as far as they were aware – Shippam’s hadn’t tried getting in touch, which implies that the company is unlikely to know who created and maintained the account and probably just contacted Twitter directly.

And finally, the question I was most interested in: what was their reason for creating the account?

‘I was interested in seeing what would happen if I did’.

UPDATE OF UPDATE

Ahh, so, it turns out the guy behind it is actually being very public about the fact he was behind it (here he is on Twitter talking about it all), rendering my prior unmasking concerns entirely unnecessary. Well played throughout, Mr Jefferson, you social media terrorist, you.

Rich Leigh is an account director at 10 Yetis PR Agency. Follow him on Twitter @GoodandBadPR.