I’ve been updating some of our Custom Communication social media workshops over the last week and so I’ve been revisiting some social media case studies to see how they’ve progressed.

That’s how I came across this social media activism campaign against Shell mobilized by some residents of County Mayo, Ireland.

To be brief, the locals are “protesting against a high-pressure pipeline to pump
unrefined gas from the Corrib Field in the Atlantic Ocean to [a] new
terminal inland,” at Bellanaboy in Erris, County Mayo, as the BBC described it back in 2005.

Some of the protests have turned violent and the Irish government has installed a semi-permanent police presence to make sure Shell’s work is not disrupted.

I first heard about the Mayo protests about a year ago when I received an email from the Tara Foundation, an activist group that campaigns to protect Ireland’s natural heritage. They emailed me because I’d worked as an oil journalist and, as they explained, they were trying to raise awareness about the Shell project because they felt no-one in the media was interested in telling their story.

The Tara Foundation invited me to look at a video they’d made and put up on YouTube. You can see it here.

Now, this post is not about taking sides or making judgement on the Shell natural gas project in County Mayo. But it is about the influence of social media activism and it’s effect of a company’s reputation.

The original Tara Foundation video went up on YouTube in October 2006. It’s only been viewed 12,000 times but I bet, if the activists sent it to me, they also found every other oil and environment writer in Ireland and the UK. And whether they realised it or not, Tara (who now have started the ShelltoSea action site) tapped into some powerful Google juice with the video: search Shell + Mayo on “the Google” and the video jumps out at you. By contrast Shell’s own explanation of the project is nowhere to be seen.

Okay, so maybe Shell + Ireland is a better search term? Shell gets number one billing on that search but the ShelltoSea protest is number three with four other anti-Shell blogs and RSS-driven sites turning up on the first page.

Meanwhile, the longevity of the original Tara video is drawing more people onto YouTube where new anti-Shell/Mayo videos are being uploaded and viewed. This one, showing a police officer throwing a protester down a steep ditch has been viewed over 20,000 times in just the last six months.

Oh, if you want to read Shell’s explanation of “Corrib Natural Gas Project, one of the most exiting and ambitious engineering projects ever undertaken in Ireland,” as they put it, you’ll have to go their corporate site and download a series of PDFs.

And who’s going to do that when you can get live video on YouTube?

- Matthew