Social media can be a very useful tool, but it is not some sort of magic potion that can cure all ills, or as you pointed out fix really big problems. Too many are drinking what the snake oil salesman is selling I’m afraid.

The one big downside to the giant rush of social media usage by companies and brands is that the use of Twitter, facebook, blogs, etc. often come with a haphazard approach. And having BP merely tweet out a request for ideas with a monetary award is just that – haphazard. It does little to reassure a very worried public, not to mention investors and government agencies. And quite frankly, as Jay pointed out above, it makes the company seem even more inept than it probably already is.

But worse than that, and this is the crux of the issue that many social media gurus often miss, BP is a publicly-traded company that has investors throughout the world, many of whom are not accustomed to what Americans and some Europeans now accept as the culture of complete transparency (or at least the call for it) by companies. While BP has certainly done some things that will haunt the company for many years to come in terms of legal battles, if I were on the BP communications team, I’d be quick to point out that public disclosing a tweet of the nature suggested might implicate the company in some rather large legal battles.

And while I’m not the biggest fan of a company’s legal team getting involved with certain tactics of social media, a company that is in the midst of probably the biggest corporate crisis of this generation has to be extremely careful about what it does and does not disclose.

The Wall Street Journal had a great article today (http://ht.ly/1Yqwd) chronicling some of BP’s public and private communications around the spill, and in the article, it’s noted that technically, BP can no longer make any type of statement about the spill – public or private (e.g. to investors) without prior approval of the US government.

We’re in unprecedented territory right now in terms of crisis communications on a massive scale within the digital age, and I certainly agree with you that’s not merely as simple as BP tweeting for help from the masses. In this case, social media may need to take a backseat to real, true experts.

I like where Alanna was going with a broadcast-style Twitter profile, but ultimately they would have been ridiculed for that as well. Playing it out hypothetically, a profile would have been created to share relief and clean-up efforts. The profile would have received the @ replies of all types (most of which would have been unsupportive regardless of the transparency of corporate tweets.) The company would carry on in a futile attempt to send messages.

You may be on to something with the idea that a company just might not have enough social capital to weather a storm like this.

Thanks for sharing and getting the conversation going.

- @vedo

Good discussion here. I think that you’re spot on, but what you didn’t point out is the fall out from an oil company (and a public one at that) essentially admitting that they need help fixing this problem, and they’re willing to pay anyone a set amount for their ideas. How inept does that make the company look from the word go? The perception problem created by that type of social media initiative would have been a death sentence to the company. It goes back to the old saying, “it’s better to be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt.”

Totally agree that BP hasn’t handled this well, but involving the SM community in such an emotional and catastrophic event would have only made things much, much worse for their communications team. Typically when you involve your SM communities you want defenders and supporters out there speaking on your behalf, that was not going to be the case in this example.

In delicate situations like these, I think social media is needed but on a more subdued scale. For instance, BP could have set up a Twitter account at the start of the crisis. This account would have enabled interested followers to gather real time information on the clean-up efforts.

I know social media at its core is about interaction and engagement, but sometimes it needs to be used as a broadcasting tool. Having these updates would have shown the public that BP is concerned with the clean-up efforts and it would have put a “face” to the brand.

Would love to know what everyone else thinks.

The only thing that BP can do is apologize and fix the problem. That’s it. To suggest that we hold a Facebook contest to plug the leak? Please.