If BP can’t get anything done in the Gulf of Mexico, social media sure can.

Google “twitter oil spill” and up comes a TechCrunch article, “Central Command Turns to Twitter to Solve the Gulf Oil Spill” (followed by the words “Uh Oh,” relating to the fact that BP is looking for people with tech expertise via social media for ideas to stop the spill).

The article explains how a group of a dozen or so organizations including BP, the EPA, the U.S. Department of Interior, the Department of Defense, and OSHA have set up Deepwater Horizon Response to manage response operations. “In addition to a Web site for this effort,” the article notes, “there’s a Facebook page, a Twitter account, a Flickr account and a YouTube account.” All of these combined efforts are giving people worldwide a ton of information about the spill. The Twitter page alone has 7,843 followers.

How does this relate to your business? Realizing that the chance is nill that you’ll have to pull a PR/social media blitz the scope of BP’s within the lifetime of your business, the incident nevertheless highlights the power of the Internet and social media to get information out to large groups of people. You can, in essence, move mountains, whether you need to inform about a disruption in your business, a problem you’ve encountered with a product or service or another notable breach that affects you and your customers.

Say something does happen to your company that demands a bit of finesse; what if a figurative “oil spill” occurred and you suddenly found that you had to rely on social media marketing to clean up the mess?

Your company and what it stands for are emblazoned into a brand name; if your brand becomes tarnished there’s no better way to blunt the PR damage than through a social media marketing campaign. Use these Internet tools to explain, to inform and to mitigate, if not on a global basis, then on a local level. Customers are customers, whether they span the globe or take out their garbage on the next street.

Social media is fast becoming synonymous with information resource. Used effectively it can help you pave the way to better relations with customers.

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