Like many people, I’ve been glued to the news coverage of the Oil Spill. Beyond the tragedy, it has been incredibly interesting to see this play out online. There have been a lot of angles, and tons of content, so I thought I’d share some interesting finds and observations from around the web.
* There is a huge disparity between online coverage (such as blogs) and within the mainstream press. While initially interested, blogs quickly moved on to more pressing issues like Facebook privacy and the new iPhone.
* Creative agency jess3 got a bit of press for releasing a Firefox plug-in which once installed, blacks out all instances of “British Petroleum” across the web, so that “the company which cannot be named” will never offend readers again.
* @BPGlobalPR An anonymous guerilla tweeter has taken a darkly humorous stand on the calamity by adopting BP’s voice. His snipes are incredibly popular with almost 140,000 followers as of June 8, 2010.
* Grassroots Mapping crowd sourced aerial images of the spill, filling in the blanks in the coverage of the spill. In a related note, the Louisiana Bucket Brigade has also crowd sourced the mapping of the spill. It’s interesting to see how it spread over time by adjusting the controls on the map.
* There are over 457,000 people in Facebook’s largest “Boycott BP” group and over 20 other groups with 1000 or more people in them. Many fake BP pages have cropped up with messages from the venomous to the inane.
* On the pro-BP side, well there’s BP themselves. They have deployed a robust array of digital assets, all aggregated here.
* And of course there’s the joint Deep Water Horizon Unified Response effort – which does a good job of being generally informative and helpful, with its own suite of social media tools, courtesy of the US Government.
Nothing on the social media menu was missed. BP’s Facebook page has frequent updates about their clean-up efforts and a live feed of the leak underwater. Their YouTube channel features an apology and a promise to make the situation right from Tony Hayword. Their Flickr page shows the multi-pronged approach to their effort – day by day – and their Twitter profile keeps a steady drum beat of updates and reaffirmation that “the job is far from done” and that BP will “make it right.” They have also released websites for each of the states affected.
All this content is great, but it’s getting lost in the cacophony – which is largely negative for BP. SEO requires time and that’s one resource BP doesn’t have. Rather then let the news outlets tell the story for them, they’ve taken out paid search ads for terms like “oil spill” and “oil news”. Reportedly, they’re spending upwards of $10,000 per day to make sure that their side of the story isn’t lost. Paid media was also used by Toyota during their recent recall crisis.
Not surprisingly, they’re taking a lot of flak for this type of expenditure. As an American, I understand the outrage. As a digital marketer and communications professional, I recognize that if BP is going to emerge out of this crisis and rebuild their image, it must be done. Enduring slings and arrows is something BP better get comfortable with; they won’t be going away any time soon.
Does anyone see other interesting tactics being used to get the various messages out about the oil spill – whatever the perspective or source? Be sure to list them in the comments section.
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