"A Great Day for Oiled Pelicans:” BP, Twitter, and the Deep Water Horizon Crisis Response

Abstract

On April 20, 2010, British Petroleum (BP) experienced one of the most tragic industrial accidents in history when 11 employees were killed and dozens more injured as the result of an explosion that tore through an offshore drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico. In the months that followed, BP grappled with the clean-up efforts as millions of gallons of oil spewed into the Gulf of Mexico on the eve of the region’s peak tourism season. BP also faced immense reputational damage and needed effective crisis communication to restore this damage with its stakeholders. This study uses content analysis to assess the organization’s communication efforts on the social media platform, Twitter, within the framework of the Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT) model.To more fully understand the role of social media during a major environmental disaster, a total of 1,142 tweets were coded from April 29, 2010, to September 10, 2010, from the account @Oil_Spill_2010 (The name of the account later changed to @Restore_TheGulf and came under the control of the U.S. government.). Within the 1,142 tweets coded during the selected period, there were 1,596 crisis response message strategies found. Consistent with the SCCT, the deal cluster of strategies was most evident in the organization’s Twitter messages, comprising 47.87% (ingratiation, n = 433, 27.13% and concern, n = 331, 20.74%) of all coded strategies. With the proliferation of social media in our society, effective and efficient organizational responses during crises are certain to become more and more dependent on social networking platforms. This study takes an important first step in testing the SCCT model within the framework of social media sites