A number of years ago, the tanker Erika, carrying 16,000 tons of TotalFina oil, broke under gale-force winds and waves off the southwest Brittany coast of France. Fuelled by the storm, the oil spill quickly spread - out of control. Local citizens' groups along and the local areas set up websites and coordinated their response to the "end of the century crisis." Greenpeace and other environmental groups took a prominent role in support.

Nine months later, still hurting from the experience, TotalFina launched a $ 3.5+ million advertising campaign to stem the tide of criticism. Its image - and share price - sank during the crisis until its merger with EDF was announced.

Echo reviewed more than 500 French national, daily press items and Web sites at the time, compared TotalFina's reputation on the Net and in the French press, demonstrated the impact of the company's response to the crisis and showed the extreme polarisation of the Net.

Echo found that tougher judgments came through on the Net, on discussion and "do-it-yourself" sites calling for legislation and boycotts. The company's most negative descriptor was "irresponsible," since it was seen to have failed to take ownership of the disaster and allegedly to have hidden behind a Maltese shipping company.

Echo reported that messages projected through the Internet had different emphases from those in the conventional press. As Echo has found elsewhere, the Internet strongly reflected the environmental and moral aspects of the disaster, with strong negatives on corporate behaviour. The traditional or corporate press had far more tolerance for the company and its eventual clean-up operations and future plans.

Echo research confirmed that the Net has its own best practice standards, which must be understood and achieved for a successful presence on the web. Measuring performance against those standards is just as important for the Web as it is for the press.

N.B. TotalFina is now Total - the above was an independent study.