our social web: news and opinion from John Johnston on the state of the social media.
Frankly, in light of the ongoing Gulf oil spill, I’m surprised there aren’t even more negative comments like this appearing on BP station venues on Foursquare. Maybe there are in the US, especially around the Gulf Coast?
And as you’d expect, there are a LOT on Twitter. “Oil Spill” has been in and out of (mostly in) Trending Topics for over a month. This is what happens in social media when The Gulf Between Greenwashed Image and Reality becomes blatantly obvious.
There seems no doubt that there’s going to be a large amount of social media content in relation to the massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill. If the impact of the ongoing spill turns out to be as bad as many are suggesting, there is sure to be a continuing deluge of images, video clips, blog posts and status updates hitting the social web.
The aftermath of the spill could go on for weeks or months and have a devastating impact on the Gulf Coast. In addition to mainstream media coverage, something tells me that as the oil spill reaches the coast, citizen journalism is going to go into overdrive. With all the clean-up volunteers and people living in the area, no doubt people will tell their own stories with cameras, blogs and via Twitter and Facebook accounts.
Unsurprisingly, right from the outset blogs often categorised as “green” such as Grist (a Technorati Top 100 blog) have been covering the spill. However, soon after it became a lead news story pretty much everywhere, I noticed “Gulf” trending on Twitter as people expressed themselves and passed around links to news updates, images and blog posts.
A couple of days ago NASA released the embedded satellite images of the spill, which very popular blogs such as Mashable and The Huffington Post helped to distribute far and wide on the web. The Huffington Post now has a page dedicated to ongoing coverage of the spill, with well over a thousand comments from readers.
ReadWriteWeb reported that a multimedia website has now been set up by British Petroleum, Transocean, (the oil rig owners), the U.S. Coast Guard, the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Department of Department. The site has a Social Media section which links to a Facebook Page, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube.
After the Bush administration’s handling of Hurricane Katrina relief effort, the White House seems keen to communicate via all media that it will do “whatever it takes for as long as it takes to address this crisis”. Here are a couple of messages that have appeared on Twitter and YouTube in response to the crisis:
This video posted on YouTube was linked from Obama’s Twitter account with the message “From day one, we have launched & coordinated a relentless response to the Gulf Crisis.”
Let’s hope the Obama administration and the companies involved follow through with on their promises to put maximum effort into the clean up. Whatever the case, this is not going to be good.
