How's Your Reputation Doing These Days

Wouldn't want to be BP Oil these days. The giant oil firm is really taking the heat from the ecological damage caused by the oil spill in the Gulf these days. Ongoing efforts to close the leak have proved ineffective and oil continues to flow from the damaged pipe. Just now, with curiosity getting the best of me, I "Googled" "BP Oil Spill" and the search returned over 3,240,000 hits. Wow! This disaster is proof positive for the need of a plan to keep your business' reputation and consumer responses positive and engaging. It will be interesting to follow the social efforts of BP going forward, watching how they "listen" to the consumer and advocacy groups, "learn" from the experience, and ultimately "engage" the public to repair their reputation in the public eye. Exxon-Mobil is still hearing about the Exxon Valdez incident in 1989. But to put the interent growth into perspective for you, I just "Googled" "Exxon Valdez Oil Spill" and it returned over 1,700,000 hits. So the incident in 1989 is receiving slightly more than 50% of the 3,200,000+ google mentions that the current BP Oil incident is receiving. It's for just this reason that Social Strategy 1 has emerged into the social media market. I'd love to hear your thoughts on various methods of social monitoring and engagement. We're moving into unexplored technological times, with the internet growing faster and bigger by the day. We can either "engage" the expansion and grow with it, or we can stand idly by and watch progress pass by us like a ship on the horizon.