Social Media – from Wells to Wheels

Introduction

Social media are computer-mediated tools that allow people to create, share or exchange information, ideas, and pictures/videos in virtual communities and networks. It has permeated every facet of consumer and business interactions, be it Peer to Peer (P2P), Brand to Consumer (B2C) or Consumer to Brand (C2B). From being an additional channel, it has now become most preferred “Touchpoint” for consumers and impacts overall customer experience. For businesses and organizations, it touches most of the processes relevant to their business: Customer Care, Product Innovation, Advertising & Marketing, Public Relations, Sales and others. Oil and Gas industry is no exception to use this latest and significant media. The specific applications of Social Media for O&G industry as well their challenges are discussed.

Social Media & Their Purposes

The typical social media used by individuals and industry are LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Digg, MySpace, Flickr ETC. Companies of late spend considerable time in activities related to developing the content in the social media. The typical activities include development of social media infrastructure for the enterprise, monitoring of social media platforms to extract intelligence and interact with users and finally the execution of social media campaigns. The purpose of social media would be multi-fold. However the key purposes of using social media for an enterprise would be for Branding, Customer Service, Reputation & Crisis Management, Awareness, Talent Hunt and Internal Collaboration.

Marketing & Communication

Marketing and Communication in the Oil and Gas industry is proceeding significantly in the competitive market. Going forward social media would be driving the marketing and communications function of the industry. Due to the fear of the unknown, many oil and gas companies were reluctant to be active in the social media. But in the last few years, things are changing and many companies are now active on several digital channels like LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. The industry is now successfully employing digital channels to communicate more efficiently. Apart from promoting the activities, social media also allows the companies to educate and engage with the key stakeholders like the public, media, governments and contractors.

Some Oil and Gas companies have large, dedicated social media teams, but they remain an extra investment for many others. While most of the International Oil Companies (IOCs) have large social media teams and are fruitful on digital channels, many National Oil Companies (NOCs) or Oilfield Services (OFS) companies have just started to explore outside agencies to help them with the social media campaigns. They are beginning to understand the necessity to invite the investors for the energy investment into their countries. Social media is an ideal channel for them to get connected with the investors, since most of the investors are already quite active on the digital channels.

Oil and Gas companies not only create awareness on their new products and formulations, but also have the need to create awareness on their new processes that impact the public. For example, with the rapid development of unconventional resources like fracking, O&G companies have a need to interact with local communities to explain them the impact of their operations. Educating stakeholders through social media will be the priority for many O&G companies in the future. It is understood that social media is more powerful than money when it comes to influencing people. While the anti-fracking activists spent nearly $26,000 for social media against the fracking operations, the Colorado Oil & Gas Association had to spend nearly $900,000 on advertising in city-specific campaigns to defeat the moratoriums on fracking activities, Oil and Gas companies need to wake up in selecting the right medium to create awareness on its products and processes.

Crisis Communication & Reputation Management

Since the Oil and Gas companies do not operate in isolation, it is crucial for the companies to be able to provide factual information on any crisis to the public in a timely manner. Social media can come handy in this regard. Facebook and Twitter can be increasingly used to enable direct corporate communication with the public in the event of major emergency. Successful crisis handling is no longer just based on responding quickly, consistently and openly, but also about utilizing the right communication channels at the right time.

Oil and Gas industry are often face the challenge of being criticized from all directions. Activist groups, NGOs or media outlets may just pick up simple criticism, which may quickly turn into a major crisis and become a threat to a company and its reputation. Hence oil and gas companies need to be prepared for critical discussions and crisis communication at all times. Customers may complain about high prices for petrol or natural gas; Environment groups may protest against new projects, or catastrophic events like oil spills or other disasters. There is a wide range of topics that can affect the business and reputation. It is critical for the Public Relations and Communications teams at the Oil and Gas companies to monitor the overall discussions about them and be cognizant of the sentiment towards them. With conventional tools, it may be difficult to keep track of the external discussions and do the crisis management in right time.

For any successful crisis communications, short response time is essential. Any delay in response would build up negative reporting. During the Macondo blow-out, BP realised this. If the company had proper social media monitoring mechanism in place, it would have helped significantly cutting down on the response time.

Communications team at Oil and Gas companies can get an overview of the social media discussions, and see how many people are talking about a particular critical topic, by filtering overall mentions for specific topics. Based on the situation, they may involve the Crisis managers to address the issues and concerns at the earliest so that the situation is under control.

Talent Hunt

Much is talked in the Oil and Gas industry about the skill shortage due to the large scale retiring of talented set of employees, which is known as Big Crew Change. To offset this, companies need to hire workers with niche skill-set in a short span of time. In order to achieve this, they first enhance the company’s image and reputation as an employer using social media. After that, the companies use the same social media to identify and attract the best talent available. Maersk Drilling is a classic example of leveraging social media to hunt the best talent available. They in fact have designed an unique online game called “Quest For Oil” on their website. Whosoever enrolled for the game need to test their analytic skills looking for oil on a seismic map, and then extract it using high-tech drilling equipment. The game would also test the players on their technical expertise in maneuvering the rigs, monitoring the process parameters such as temperature and pressure, before digging out and producing the oil. The idea is that the game would help the company to primarily attract the young talented technical force to come and play the online game, through which the company can identify the right candidates for recruitment.

Enterprise Collaboration

Social Media tools typically enable enhanced collaboration and information sharing for users such as Employees, Partners, Candidates, Customers, Local Population and Industry Experts. They may include Internal Blogs, Communities, Discussion Forums, Idea Junction, Micro-Blogs, and Internal Wikis. The primary objective of the enterprise social media is to improve collaboration, help knowledge transfer and be a single sign-on knowledge repository. Today’s O&G business is becoming increasingly complex with the development of Offshore and unconventional resources, Complex drilling process and Digital Oil Fields. These reasons call for improved collaboration tools to facilitate exchange of information and also to enable more frequent and detailed reporting

Big Crew Change calls for knowledge transfer tools for seamless transfer of knowledge

• Virtual learning for geographically dispersed business units
• With mergers & acquisitions, business units spread across different geography
• Virtual Centres of Excellence formed to support in real time, day-to-day operations in other locations

Current Trend & Adoption Challenges for Social Media in Oil and Gas Industry

Social Business is one of the Key IT trends along with Mobility, Analytics and Big Data that would transform the O&G business in the long run. For business-to-consumer (B2C) sectors, such as Retail and Marketing, the potential benefits of social media are quite straightforward; it enables a more direct way of engaging with the customers. Though few of the O&G companies extensively use social media for a variety of purposes, there are many to follow suit. The major concerns in adoption of the social media by these companies are:

• IT security – Engaging in the extensive use of social media is often perceived as a risk worth avoiding.
• Unclear on ROI – Many companies have doubt over the potential ROI. They think social business is an additional cost for the company
• Potential misuse by employees – Companies think that employees may misuse the external social media for non-work-related purposes

Social Media Solutions

There are many tools in the market to monitor social media. But organizations still suffer from poor, un-actionable analytics, lack of a one-stop shop and the inability to scale-up with small vendors. An Integrated Social Media Solution can help the enterprises with actionable insights and proactive solutions in a world of multiplying factors and multiple interaction points. It can perform all social media tasks like crawling, analysis and tag posts, response generation, crisis monitoring, advocating influencers and creating business intelligence reports. Social Media Solution can help enterprises with actionable insights and proactive solutions that help build the brand. In summary it shall be a comprehensive 360° solution for social media management.

Typical features of Social Media Solutions are:

• Competitive benchmarking capabilities to enable you to track company’s strengths and weaknesses relative to competitors
• Net Promoter Score (NPS) based analytics with the ability to drill down to drivers and flesh out actionable insights
• Language capabilities that enable NLP analytics to be done in languages other than English
• Automated post prioritization feature that ensures engagement with high priority posts first and ignores ‘junk’ posts
• Built in business rules engine that facilitates routing to category specific agents to ensure efficient engagement based on vertical specific processes

Benefits of Social Media Solutions for O&G companies:

• Engaging with the fuel retail customers at every stage of the Social Media cycle
• Creating awareness on new products as well as new processes such as Fracking
• Influencing fuel retail outlet customers to buy other products from the associated convenient stores
• Feedback mechanism on fuel quantity, quality, HSE practices
• Improving customer loyalty

How to go about it?

When the Oil and Gas industry is hesitant to make a full-fledged investment in Social Media resources, they can think of availing the services on a “Pay-as-you-use” model. Today IT service providers offer such services through their dedicated Social Media Command Centre (SMCC). This SMCC centre can monitor, engage and act as the nerve centre for the company’s interaction across its various business functions. It can enable organizations to listen and respond to increasingly important Voice of Customer that may not be achieved with distributed groups within companies as they cannot weave in the 360 degree view of the customer, vision of the overall brand, all lines of business and corporate strategy into their social media activities. SMCC enabled business growth and results can far exceed isolated programs, simply because of its capability to collate, correlate, synthesize and disseminate information with a 360 degree impact across business processes and needs.

IT service provider bring in all components of a command centre that enables businesses at any stage of their digital and social media journey to achieve more. With the capability of Strategy, Platform and Social Media Specialists to provide services, business functions can be rest assured of significant benefits from a Social Media Command Centre.

It is high time that Oil and Gas industry actively participates in the social media and leverages the benefits.

The above article was first published at oilgasmonitor.com in Apr 2016 and can also be accessed at https://www.oilgasmonitor.com/social-media-wells-wheels/