Social Media Monitoring Project- Part I: Exxon Mobile

Exxon Mobil and Social Media

I.                   History of Exxon Mobile

ExxonMobil began in 1859, when Colonel Edwin Drake drilled an oil well in Titusville, Pennsylvania.

The Drake Well was the first in the world to be drilled for the sole purpose of finding oil, needed to satisfy a growing demand as a consequence of the industrial revolution.

Since then, Exxon Mobil grew from a regional marketer of kerosene into a flourishing corporation

With 37 oil refineries in 21 countries constituting combined daily refining capacities of 6.3 million barrels, ExxonMobil is the largest publicly traded petroleum and petrochemical enterprise in the world. 

ExxonMobil is one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world. In May, ExxonMobil was first  in the Fortune 500, vastly outdoing its competitions and other sizable corporations such as Ford, Chevron , Microsoft and Apple.

ExxonMobil’s has a vast amount and great variety of share and stakeholders. Their website identifies 5 categories of stakeholders: the governments of the 47 countries in which they have operations, its estimated 2.5 million individuals and more than 2,000 institutions shareholders (including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation ), its estimated 160,000 suppliers of goods and services, and its nearly 77, 000 employees in 67 countries around the world.  

II.                Current Online Presence

When I first goggled « Exxon mobile and social media », the first result was a Forbes article called “Exxon Mobil has apathetic website. Why?” The authors go on to examine the different social media tools that the corporations have and has not tapped into. The authors conclude by saying that the corporate websites are tricky since the audience of these website are generally job searchers, analysts and journals which are three different types of people, with different level of social media and virtual engagement.

Before accepting this article at face value, it is important to independently analyzes qualitatively the reality of Exxon Mobile social media.

Website

The cooperation has a website accessible at http://corporate.exxonmobil.com. The website interface is smooth, and contains information on the company for journalists and investors, as well as a career plateform 

Youtube

Since April 2006, Exxon Mobil has been active on YouTube and the channel has 7000 subscribers and over 1236130 views. In addition to their offical page, they have also partnered with three subsidiary YouTube pages –OfficialMobil1, Official Mobil and mobile industries that have 5K, 74 and 128 subscribers respecting

They have 54 videos on their page. Some of them are 30 second clips that seek to demonstrate how cutting edge and advance the company is. 

 

For example, this video explains how ExxonMobil is providing natural gas security to Western Europe.

The latest video, posted 2 months ago, is another 30 second clips that highlights Exxon investment in energy efficient. This clip has over 3,000,000 views. 

Finally, Exxon has also posted clips that highlight their charitable work in the world, such as the national you teach programs. This is a longer clip (2:00) and highlights the incredible financial contributes that Exxon partakes in giving nonprofits and SETM initiatives. 

Since ExxonMobil is an international cooperation with over 100 years of experience in the Middle East and North African region, it is understandable that some of the YouTube videos are not going to be in the English language, such as the video below; 

Thus, Exxon knows how to use their YouTube page. However, what is common about all of these videos and clips is that line at the bottom of the screen:

The official channel of the company has videos highlighting the real time updates of the company, employee videos, advertisement campaigns, and videos from the top management and leadership discussing various issues regarding the company and its products, environment issues, challenges and the company efforts.

Blog

Another major effort of Exxon Mobil is its Perspectives blog which is run by Ken Cohen, ExxonMobil's vice president of public and government affairs. The blog talks about company's views on the issues, policies, technologies and trends that are shaping the energy industry and Ken Cohen talks about ideas and actions from industry, governments, researchers and many others that affect the world of energy. The blog was started in November 2011 and it is widely followed and read by many people online

Again though, Ken Cohen is the only contributor to the blog. There is no place for contributors or comments. It is just his view and his contribution.

Twitter:

Exxon Mobil has an official twitter account with about 26,000 followers and more than 1000 tweets. However, when looking over the various tweets one sees that they are only focused on  providing news about the company and direction towards the Perspectives blogs.

Instagram

Their Instagram page is abysmal. With only 34 followers and one posts, it looks like the attempt to have an Instagram page was abandoned.

Now that we have looked over the variety of tools that Exxon uses ( or does not), it is important to look at the dynamic aspect of social media, through the use of a variety of online search web based tools. 

Google Trends

Google trends enables researchers and social media enthusiastic the world's interest in a topic over time. By entering "Exxon mobile" as a keyword, we see a graph that displays how often they've been searched on Google over time. Additionally, Google Trends shows how frequently Exxon has appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most.

Search interest in Exxon Mobil since early 2005

In this graph, we see that there has been one major peak in google searches of "Exxon Moil" in the past 10 years. This was in January 2008, when Venezuela decided to halt their sales to Exxon Mobile. This decision generated anxiety and buzz in the petroleum community. 

A second interesting tidbit of information that Google trends gives us, is the origin of the majority of the searches.  In other words, it tells you where the searches are coming from. Can you guess where the most searches are coming from? 
a) USA 
b) France
c) Nigeria 

-- Correct answer is Nigeria!! 

However, since 2009, there has been a overall decrease of the number of Exxon Mobil Google search.

Ice Rocket

IceRocket is a real time search engine that monitors blog searches and posting for any company. When we type in Exxon Mobile into the search bar, we see the following graph which demonstrates the amount of blogging and posting done in the last month;

On this chart we see two things. First, there are major changes in the percent of blog post- the chart display reminds me of the Himalayas, but also the fact that Exxon does not have a strong presence in the bloggersphere. These conclusions can also be said, if one expands the time frame to the last three months, as the chart below demonstrates.

Social Mention

Alexa 

Social Baker

Conclusions

• With a website, twitter, blog and youtube account, Exxon Mobil does have a virtual presence.
• However, the social media monitoring tools demonstrate that there has been little desire to actually engage or energize the groundswell.
• The lack of Instagram, or Facebook page or the ability to comment on YouTube pages, demonstrates that Exxon might not want to engage their online community anyway.