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Posts Tagged ‘BP’

Why Do Certain Stories Travel In Social Media While Others Don’t?

I’m sure this has happened to you too. You get really busy with work and fail to read or check the news for a few days. But when half of your day is spent with Twitter going in the background, you don’t really mind so much because the good people of the internet are usually quite good about letting you know what’s going on in the world that you might have missed. This happens to me all too often. But, imagine my surprise when on the weekend I happen to catch the news for the first time in a while, only to learn that a ship has hit a reef in New Zealand and is leaking oil into the sea. Imagine my surprise when I learn that this oil spill has been going on for a week.

How could I not have known this? I spend most of my day in front of a computer screen and try to keep up on news, especially that flowing through Twitter and other social media channels. Yet somehow this news seemed to go unnoticed. It made me wonder if maybe it was my lack of attention or if it was something else, so I decided to do a little research. Using Sysomos, I decided to look into talk about the oil spill coming through social media.

In order to not miss out on anything I decided to make my search very broad. I pulled up any talk about “oil spill” for the last month in social media. In that time frame I found 8,722 blog posts, 39,395 online news articles, 3,633 forum postings and 21,990 tweets mentioning an “oil spill.” While these numbers aren’t very small by any means, they seem a bit lacking to me for a months worth of data compared to what I saw last week in 13 hours worth of monitoring talk about Steve Jobs’ passing.

Trended out over time this data looks like the chart below. What’s interesting is that there seemed to be quite a bit of talk about “oil spill” near the beginning of the chart, but the spill off the coast of New Zealand didn’t even start until October 4th (October 5th in New Zealand). We can see an uptake in talk around that date too now, but it appears most of the “oil spill” talk was from something else.

I then decided to look into what the “oil spill” talk was about. I pulled up a word cloud and couldn’t find any mention of “New Zealand,” “Rena” (the name of the ship that is losing the oil), or “Tauranga” (the name of the city in The Bay of Plenty near where the ship struck reef). I thought this was a little strange.

I then decided to change my timeline. I changed the dates that I was looking at to show from October 1st to today and finally was able to find talk about the spill off the coast of New Zealand.

Using this new date range I looked at the activity levels once again. This time I found 3,356 blog posts, 7,015 online news articles, 1,528 forum posts and 11,279 tweets in the 12 day period. Again, these numbers seemed strange to me that they were so low. This is probably the worst environmental disaster that New Zealand has ever seen.

Now, the spill off the coast of New Zealand has been reported to so far have lost about 350 tonnes of oil. This is nowhere near the amount of oil we saw spewed into the seas last year with the BP oil spill. That said though, the environmental effects that this spill will have on the wildlife in New Zealand could be devastating to the area for years and years to come. Not to really compare the two oil spills in terms of magnitude, I decided to look at social media talk about each of them. I pulled up data of talk that contained the words “oil spill” and “BP” and compared it to talk of “oil spill” and “New Zealand” or “NZ” for the last year. While the BP spill was plugged up in July of 2010 (out of the year long date range), the chart below tells an interesting story about how one disaster received far more talk than another.

Looking at data like this this brings up interesting questions. Why does one news story spark more people to talk than another? Does it have to do with magnitude? Does it have to do with where in the world it happens? Do stories that travel in social media have to appeal to a certain type of person over another? I don’t have answers to these questions, but I do feel like they’re interesting ones to ask. I started to look into this topic because of personal curiosity, but felt that people would be interested to see what I found. I’d love to hear your thoughts on these questions in the comments.

By Sheldon Levine - October 13th, 2011 - 2 Comments »
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Posted in Samples, Social Media

The Oil Leak Has Been Plugged, But The Talk Continues

On April 20th an explosion occurred on British Petroleum’s (BP) oil drilling rig known as Deepwater Horizon. The explosion caused Deepwater Horizon to sink into the ocean, which in turn broke a pipe causing oil to leak into The Gulf of Mexico. This leak went on for about three months and is being dubbed one of the worst man-made disasters ever. Last Thursday BP finally managed to plug the pipe and stop the oil from flowing out into the ocean.

If you saw any kind of media around this oil spill you may have noticed BP was taking a lot of criticism from everywhere. We thought it would be interesting to see how this event affected their public image in the online social space using our social media monitoring and analytics platform, MAP.

In order to get a fair assessment, we broke our study into three separate time periods; the beginning of the year up to the date of the oil rig explosion (April 20th), the period the leak went on for (April 20 – July 15) and the past week since they plugged the leak.

From the beginning of the year until April 20th there was no shortage of talk going on around BP. Looking at this time period we can see that BP was mentioned in almost 93,000 blog posts, over 202,000 forum posts and in about 244,000 tweets. In this time period we also can see that BP was in good favour of those discussing them with a 76% overall favourable sentiment rating.


Then the day of the explosion came. On April 20th Deepwater Horizon sank and oil started to pour out of the well into the Gulf of Mexico until it was finally plugged up almost three months later. During this time the world couldn’t stop talking about the British oil giant. In the course of this period there were around 602,000 blog posts, 860,000 forum messages and a whopping 4.6 million tweets. This time period also saw their favourable sentiment percentage drop more than 20%. The most drastic change here comes from the negative sentiment around BP rising from 22% to 46%.


Now that the leak has been capped and the oil has stopped flowing into the ocean, there might be speculation that talk and criticism of British Petroleum may have calmed down. Our analysis shows that this not the case. Granted, the leak was only capped a week ago, but talk about it has not seemed to slow down. In the past week there has been over 55,000 blog posts, 42,000 forum mentions and almost 528,000 tweets about BP. Most interesting is that there were more tweets about the company in this last week than there were in the first four months of the year. Also, despite the worst being over (the actual leaking), the overall sentiment of BP has not changed much. The overall sentiment rating still stands at 54% favourable. However, while negative sentiment has not gone down, we did see a slight rise in their positive sentiment from 16% to 19%.


With their positive sentiment on the rise it will be interesting to look again at these numbers in a few months to give a roughly equal time period of measurement and to let the clean up of the spill take it’s affect on both the Gulf of Mexico and the general public talking about it. If BP handles the next few months properly, they may be able to swing the public’s opinion back in their favour. Only time will tell.

By Sheldon Levine - July 23rd, 2010 - 1 Comment »
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Posted in Samples, Social Media, Technology

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