For big brands in hot water, there is a tried and true method of handling a nasty PR crisis. It starts with quickly and comprehensively crafting your response and then identifying who you want to reach with your message. If it's a nationwide product recall, you better get on the phone with the national newspapers and TV news outlets. If it's a local chemical leak, regional newspapers and radio stations will do. If only it were so easy to deal social media-inspired consumer outcry. Online activists use social networks like Facebook, Twitter and blogs on a nearly daily basis to mobilise the public in protests, boycotts and pressure campaigns directed at major corporations. Most of these efforts go nowhere. But every once in a while a cause catches the interest of the networked public and, like a wild fire, it spreads from a local issue to a globe-spanning reputation-wrecker. Case in point is the massive Boycott BP movement which now has 356 offshoots on

Facebook alone, each organised by different individuals across the United States and in Europe too. A month old, the movement now draws on the strength of more than 325,000 committed members, thousands of whom are advocating email- and letter-writing campaigns to company officials and members of Congress, or worse, they're organising flash protests. If you are BP, how do you respond to such a vast uprising? Whether BP succeeds or not in defusing the uproar, it's a crisis that will no doubt be studied in business schools for years to come.

The Sting in the Long Tail An analysis of BP’s growing social media crisis

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Oil Spill barrels per day: 19,000 | New Facebook anti-fans per day: 27,000

BP PR (fake) Twitter followers: 119,000 | BP_America (real) Twitter followers: 10,100

Redesigned BP logos on Flickr: 600+ | BP share price: 33% drop

By The Numbers

Anatomy of a Crisis Tracking the social media blowup

April 20 - The Deepwater Horizon gas rig explodes in the Gulf of Mexico and the first gush of oil rushes out from below the sea floor. Within a few days the first disparate, individual tweets, blog posts and Facebook updates, mainly from the more eco-minded members of the public appear, imploring the rest of us to penalize BP for the environmental catastrophe that is unfolding and stop giving them our business. May 1- 5 - The initial response is tepid. A few re-Tweets and blog posts continue daily through the first week of early May. Meanwhile, membership on the various BP boycott groups on Facebook steadily climbs, adding, at first, a few hundred recruits each day, then more, and more. To a crisis PR expert though the online activity of the pressure groups is still considered fringe. In any case, the agitators are ignored as it is believed their online campaign remain too small to pose a threat.

May 21 - The first reports of oil washing ashore on barrier islands in the Gulf are reported and the overall chatter about the spill hits overdrive on Twitter, Facebook and the blogs. The clamour on blogs doubles almost overnight). May 26, CNN reports the existence of the primary "Boycott BP Facebook" group. Blog chatter climbs four-fold, tipping off still more bloggers and more news outlets who write about the phenomenon. CNN tells us there are 118,000 members at the time it files its story. May 28 - the number of members swells to 172,000. The movement has gone mainstream. May 31 - Still more bad news is to befall BP. Its big hope, the "Top Kill" capping effort, fails over Memorial Day weekend. The "Boycott BP" blogstorm rebounds yet again, as the chart above indicates. June 2 - a full week after the CNN report, membership of the Boycott BP Facebook group has more than doubled to 277,461.

Before we can look forward to its potential impact on BP's brand reputation, not to mention on its bottom line and share price, it's important to see how this movement originated. Here's a timeline that we've compiled by crunching the numbers of over 1,500 blogs and news stories posted between May 1 and May 31 that specifically discussed boycotting BP:

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Before the age of blogs, Twitter and Facebook, the big sting for companies happened at the outset of the incident and what followed was a long tail of diminishing interest from the press and the public alike. Such a scenario was much easier to manage as it was predictable. It stayed a threat only as long as it stayed in the public eye. Once a new, fresher, bigger story occurred somewhere else, the news media and public attention would shift away. It would have looked something like chart 1 (above), ending with a fizzle. The modern age of communications makes this phenomenon nearly obsolete as chart 2 shows. Instead, a brewing protest movement can come from anywhere. Often it gathers kindred followers online and grows slowly at first. It might attract attention from niche blogs, local news outfits, anybody with some level of influence and following. This added attention is just enough to push the movement into a new more visible

light. This initial outside surge of interest is the tipping point, capturing the attention of a whole new group of people, which brings it to the attention now of the mainstream media. After their initial stories, the movement experiences a third life and a fourth. It's the tail that contains the sting now and it creates a whole new set of headaches for specialists in crisis PR and reputation management. This is just the beginning. The half-life of these PR crises extends for weeks, months, even years more and has the capability to reignite yet again. The oil giant this week says it has a new plan to cap the oil gusher, one that has a greater chance than "Top Kill" of containing the leak. The question is: does it have a better solution to contain the PR problem on land too?

The Changing Curve of a Corporate Crisis

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1, The Classic Long Tail PR Crisis

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For more information contact: Matthew Yeomans - matthew@socialmediainfluence.com Mark Pigou - mark@socialmediainfluence.com

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