A week is a long time in social media

Three weeks is even longer.

I’ve spent plenty of time harping on about the myriad problems the web causes for traditional media, but it’s only this week that I’ve experienced one of those problems first hand.

In the first half of May, I’d agreed to kick off a short column for Communicate Magazine called “On Trend”, which uses Cision Social Media to interrogate the social media response the key issues of the day.

It’s that “day” that’s the problem. With a two week lead-time for the item, the current issue of Communicate features a commentary on BP’s social media response to the Gulf oil spill that looks like something preserved in aspic.

It starts reasonably enough:

The company quickly recognized the scope and nature of the challenge, quickly establishing a microsite (at a speed that suggests a crisis-ready darksite, hardly surprising for a company exposed to the risks of an oil major), a Facebook group and a dedicated Twitter feed, @BP_America, whose content is being retweeted across BP’s other Twitter channels.

But then comes the claim that “@BP_America has become a lightening rod for the social media response”. This feels like something penned many years rather than just a few weeks ago, what with there being no mention of @Oil_Spill_2001 or, still worse, no @BPGlobalPR.