How BP’s Oil Spill Has Drifted Into Social Media

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How BP’s Oil Spill Has Drifted Into Social Media

Everyone that seems to have an opinion about BP’s oil spill (either hopeful or negative) seems to be expressing those thoughts through the internet. The world has taken to the blogosphere, Facebook, Twitter, Photobucket, YouTube and other web 2.0 channels to spread their message. There is no doubt that BP has heard them loud and clear but can they even begin to control this social media spill?

Orange8 agency posted the below Sysomos MAP which shows the general sentiment levels for “BP” throughout the blogosphere. The graph shows that in January and February the sentiment levels were generally neutral or positive. However by the end of April you could see the growing trend of negativity. In May the negative sentiment only grew stronger, as 51% of all “BP” related blog posts were negative. An alarming trend that will probably rise or remain stable until the oil spill has been controlled.

The question is what can / should BP do? Let’s look at the raw numbers of media being produced revolving around the BP oil spill. *Current as of writing this post.

According to Icerocket.com, there have been more than 97,00 blog posts discussing BP since mid-March, with 1,084 new posts per day.
2,992 links in the last 30 days were shared on Digg.com containing the words, BP Oil Spill.
3,940 videos have been uploaded to YouTube containing the exact match of “BP Oil Spill.”
A fake Twitter account was created in mid-May to parody BP’s efforts in cleaning up the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, BPGlobalPR. The account currently has 134,792 followers which is 1,036% greater than the official BP Twitter account, BP_America.

BP’s official Facebook Page has been averaging over 155 comments per BP wall post. The vast majority of these comments are argumentative or negative in sentiment.
There are 317 Facebook pages that include “BP Oil Spill” in the title. The largest five groups (all negative) cumulatively have over 57,000 supporters.
An additional 480 Facebook pages exist that include “Boycott BP” in the title. The largest five groups cumulatively have 478,000 supporters!

So what is BP to do with all of this negative press? Is there anything they really can do? BP won’t be able to control the public’s response, the snowball of negativity, frustration and anger has gained far too much momentum to be stopped. The one thing that BP can and has started to do is be open, and to give raw transparency. Toyota was responsible with their mishap earlier this year. They addressed the problem and didn’t hide anything from the public. Running a TV ad campaign to address how committed BP is to cleaning up the Gulf of Mexico was a horrible idea. The campaign failed because in the public’s opinion, the time and costs to produce the campaign only took resources away from the clean up effort.

I’m sure BP is leveraging every resource in their possession to clean up the oil spill, now their executives just need to stop thinking about addressing shareholders and attempting to sway the public’s opinion of BP – because at this point, they are only wasting their breath. The evidence is in both the social media trends and the free fall of BP’s common share price. BP can only eliminate the negativity by cleaning up the mess they caused in the Gulf of Mexico.

If the BP oil spill has got to you as much as it has the rest of the web, you can always download the Oil Spill Firefox Plug-in from creative agency, Jess3.com. The plug-in bloats out any mention of “BP” in your browser.