The British Petroleum Company (aka BP) has been grabbing headlines of late for its role in a massive oil spill off the Gulf of Mexico. This morning, the New York Times' Green blog examined the response within social media channels in a post entitled "Social Media and the Spill".

It was interesting to see an outlet like the NYT looking to the social sphere to examine how the conversation was playing out. I decided to go a small step further by looking at some actual numbers from social media channels according to one of the top online monitoring tools.

To start, here's a graphic showing blogosphere sentiment around "BP" OR "British Petroleum" since the beginning of 2010. Not surprisingly, negative sentiment has spiked to some 64% in the past month, up from an average of roughly 19.5% in the previous three months.

 

 

"BP" AND "oil spill" By-the-Numbers

  • 9,133 blog mentions
  • 23,212 Tweets
  • 49.5 million Twitter impressions

 

 

Clearly the conversation appears to be at or near its peak (barring any new developments), it will be interesting to see where things go from here.