Scenario

• In April 2010 BP suffered what was to become one of the largest global corporate crises in history with the sinking of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig and subsequent release of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
• Shortly after the spill BP, through its retained PR agency Brunswick, appointed corporate social media monitoring specialist Social360 to monitor online discussion of and reaction to the crisis.

Strategy

• The volume of discussion on the social web about the issue, in excess of 50,000 posts a day, meant that a simple dissemination of every post was not viable. In addition, statistical analysis of content volumes or sentiment were not relevant – what was needed was a contextual analysis of the content of social media discussion around the crisis.
• Social360 takes a two-phase approach to social media monitoring. Its proprietary technology identifies relevant conversations on the social web (blogs, Twitter, Facebook, forums, etc.) and these results are then filtered and analyzed by a team of human editors into concise reports for client consumption.

• Social360 provided two reports per day for the BP team 7 days a week. The volume of discussion meant that filtering and summarizing content themes was the key priority. BP required a concise and complete analysis of the key issues being discussed on the social web each day – reports had to be consumable ‘on a Blackberry whilst flying over the Gulf in a helicopter’.
• BP already had in place a comprehensive off-line media monitoring and analysis function and there was therefore no need for this content to be mirrored in the social media analysis. A key challenge was therefore to identify only those topics that were social media originated or specific, rather than those which were primarily reflections of mainstream news or content.
• Key content that was of interest included any advance waming of NGO activity or protests, grass roots reports of the impact of pollution from areas around the spill site, consumer reaction to key issues such as allegations of dispersant poisoning, identification of potential threats to staff members or management and also online response to developments in the search for a solution to the leak.

  Results

• Social360 maintained a constant overwatch facility for BP for seven months following the spill, until the leak was contained and the main corporate developments were complete. Over this period Social360 processed more than 10.5 million individual social media posts.
• The monitoring service successfully identified some key developments in the online response to the spill, including:
  • Attempts to post key executives‘ personal details online
  • Real world NGO protest and activity on the ground and at the spill site
  • Previously unidentified areas which had suffered significant environmental damage
  • Brand defacement activity and the set up of fake ‘official’ social media presences
• In addition to these specific developments, the monitoring process also identified key influencer sources on the topic on a global basis, enabling BP and its agencies to develop potential response plans.