Just as it embraced the Internet and e-mail in the 1990s, the energy industry is now embracing, or at least attempting to embrace, the new social media avenues that have opened up in the past decade.

This is refreshing, in a way. It is nice to find communication online that is written in actual English and not chatspeak. It’s nice to see videos that aren’t stupid pet tricks. And it is nice to receive communication you actually want to read from someone you actually want contacting you.

AAPG has embraced social networking media, as indicated by this Twitter site. (Image courtesy of AAPG)

But what’s in it for them? Why does ExxonMobil need a Twitter site? Surely Rex Tillerson isn’t sending chatty messages to his stockholders. E&P asked several companies and organizations how they’re using these new tools and how useful they’re finding them to be.

Twitter

For many people, Twitter is one of the more annoying social sites to come along lately. Based on the “status” feature of Facebook and other sites, Twitter allows users to “tweet” about what they are doing right now, as if breathless readers cannot wait to find read the latest exciting updates.

So why, exactly, does a major oil company need a Twitter account? E&P asked this question of Pam Rosen, manager-web and social media for Shell. She used sportscasting as an analogy.

“If you think of Howard Cosell’s sports commentating, he just gave you the headlines, just what you needed to know about the play,” she said. “He was not an in-depth sort of guy. That’s what Twitter is.”

Rosen’s group finds Twitter useful to quickly transmit headlines to a large group of people. For instance, when a storm threatens company installations, Shell will send out a tweet informing the media of its latest updates. “We’re not going to be taking tons of calls, and we’re not going to be sending out an alert,” she said. “But this way, they get it automatically.”

ION’s virtual trade show has received about 1,000 visitors. (Image courtesy of ION Geophysical)

She added that the storm update will be posted on the company Web site, and a Twitter link will automatically be created. This way all of the information goes out at the same time and is generated by the same media relations group.

Shell has a number of Twitter accounts, including the storm center, general US news, global news, and motor sports. Shell also holds student events called Eco-Marathons regionally each year, so it has a Twitter account to keep participants up to date.

“Students are watching that because they’re waiting for the next piece of information,” she said.

Rosen works hard to be sure that the tweets don’t sink to the level of “who cares?” by the readers. For instance, an intern set up the company’s “Motor Oil Matters” account. “I said, ‘This is great, but if you feel compelled to tweet something, going to get coffee would not be it,’” she said.

Still, she said, tweets are not meant to be completely dry and stodgy. “At the end of the day, I think it helps to have a little bit of personality coming through on some of those tweets,” she said.

Podcasts

Before the advent of the iPod, no one had ever heard of a podcast. Now they’re as common as e-mail.

The idea of a podcast is to get an audio message out to the audience. They can be posted online and either listened to through a computer or downloaded to an iPod for later listening. The American Petroleum Institute (API), for one, is finding them highly useful.

Jane Van Ryan, senior manager of communications for API, said her organization has been using podcasts for about two years, usually posting a new one every two weeks or so. They range from six to 12 minutes in length and are on a variety of topics of interest both to API members and to the general public.

“We’ve done them on everything from electric cars to hydraulic fracturing to oil sands, just about anything you can imagine that deals with energy,” Van Ryan said. “We don’t have any trouble coming up with topics or finding people that have a real interest in what’s happening.”

Many of the topics, of course, deal with policy issues, and she will interview an expert in that area who either has an opinion or can simply spell out the facts so that listeners can understand the issue better.

Most of the podcasts are intended for the general public and are posted on a site called Energy Tomorrow (energytomorrow.org), owned and operated by API. Podcasts are also posted on the home page, posted in Van Ryan’s blog, and aired on Blog Talk Radio.

So how does one explain hydraulic fracturing to the lay public in six to 12 minutes? “I attempt to translate,” Van Ryan said. “I attempt to ask questions to the point where people have to boil it down into layman’s terms so that it is understandable.”

And if the explanation is not clear enough, listeners can post questions to the site, which will be answered in a subsequent podcast.

“We’ve never had a single negative comment, and we get comments from people who say, ‘This is great — you can’t get this information anywhere else,’” she said. “Which is true — you can’t.”

Facebook and YouTube

The American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) didn’t have to wait for its social media offerings to be adopted by its members. “The association created these things because our members wanted them,” said Larry Nation, AAPG communications director. “It wasn’t a ‘build it and they will come’ — they were already doing this, and we built it, and they really came.”

What it’s built is an enviable array of social networking sites, including Facebook, LinkdIn, MySpace, and five Twitter accounts. And the members continue to develop more sites. A student chapter in Indonesia, for instance, has set up a Facebook account that has more than 500 members.

For a society like AAPG that is attempting to attract younger members, social networking makes sense. “It’s predominantly a very youthful medium that this social networking is catering to,” he said. “It makes sense that we have to be there if we want to communicate with the younger generation.”

It’s not likely to replace monthly publications like AAPG’s Explorer magazine, he said. But different sites offer different capabilities. Facebook, for instance, has an audio-visual component, whereas Twitter is more useful for sending announcements and reminders during meetings.

“The good news is that strangers are getting together and connecting on everything, and it’s a topical bond that’s being created with people of like interest,” he said. “For instance, if you’re really interested in carbonates in Seminole County, Oklahoma, you’re going to be able to find somebody that’s going to give you real-time assistance or answer your questions immediately.”

In addition to Facebook, AAPG has made good use of YouTube. Nation said it was a natural decision — the organization is celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2017, so it’s been interviewing older geologists to capture their thoughts and experiences. With the advent of YouTube, topics were added to address the needs of younger members such as how to get a job and the future of petroleum geology. Currently AAPG has almost 80 YouTube videos categorized by topic.

Nation expects the next social media revolution to be real-time video conferencing through a site like Facebook. “Whenever that happens, I think our members are going to expect it of us,” he said. “There’s nothing like sitting down and having a face-to-face conversation with somebody. But Facebook has augmented what’s already there, and it has helped to connect a lot of us that otherwise wouldn’t have made those connections.”

Virtual trade shows

Anyone who works trade shows knows how much preparation is needed. ION Geophysical had to start even more from scratch when it decided to host a “virtual” trade show.

Virtual trade shows can work in two ways — they can be hosted by a group, just like a regular trade show, and companies can buy virtual booth space, or, as in ION’s case, the company hosts the trade show and uses it to highlight its own products.

The company first began discussing this concept several years ago, but at the time organizers felt there was not enough digital content to populate the site. In addition, good platforms were not yet available. But early in 2009 the concept resurfaced, with the goal of launching the trade show at the Society of Exploration Geophysicists annual meeting in October.

“We put together a plan of what it would look like, when we would launch it, and what kind of content it would have,” said Christine Feimer, director of Digital Communications for ION. “We also wanted to use crowd sourcing to help us develop better products and services.”

After meeting with several vendors, ION chose ON24 in July, and 12 weeks later the trade show was up and running. Since that launch, Feimer said, about 1,000 visitors have checked out the site.

While the company is delighted with the finished product, plans are in the works to expand it further. For instance, Feimer said, there is discussion about offering booth space to ION partners, and plans are in place to regionalize the site to include a Chinese section and a Russian section.

One section that is already available is the Land Product Lab. “This area is dedicated solely to our customers,” Feimer said. “It provides them a platform to discuss and debate topics about the seismic industry and share their ideas about the next generation of land equipment.” The fair also includes a recruitment kiosk.

Just like a Facebook page won’t replace a print publication, Feimer doesn’t expect the virtual trade show to replace the real thing. “Social media is shifting the way we communicate, and it’s becoming an element that you can’t ignore when it comes to marketing,” she said. “But it never really replaces face-to-face interaction.”