In another example of fighting fire with, um, oil, BP has been desperately buying up search terms to lead people to an insipid microsite that says more about its obsession with image than it does about its efforts to clean up the oil spill.

BP has been buying up search engine terms – such as “oil spill” – with the likes of Google, Bing and Yahoo! and linking them to a site that champions its efforts to clean up the huge mess it has created.

The site is PR guff refined to its purest form – the main images show pristine workers clearing up the oil on pristine beaches on the Gulf of Mexico (the sand is so clean and the strategically-placed birds so healthy-looking that this could be a tourism shot, albeit with holidaygoers wearing yellow overalls).

There’s also a mission-control image of BP workers looking suitably solemn, purposeful, yet calm, pointing to a map. One suspects a fly-on-the-wall at the real mission control would see a different picture: people defecating in panic, running around like headless chickens. But no, this is imagery that must send the message that everything’s OK, even though it clearly isn’t.

But perhaps BP should be commended for one thing ­– its embrace of social media has proved the perfect mirror to its handling of the oil spill crisis.

Or as Wired said in a story posted today: “BP’s Social Media Campaign Going About as Well as Capping That Well”.

BP told ABC News : “We have bought search terms on search engines like Google to make it easier for people to find out more about our efforts in the gulf and make it easier for people to find key links to information on filing claims, reporting oil on the beach and signing up to volunteer.” Which is nice.

The ‘news’ that BP is continuing to have a rough time in the social media stakes is hardly revelatory – we reported last month that BP got a pounding from a fake Twitter account, BPGlobalPR, purporting to be the oil giant’s PR team.

To date it has clocked around 150,000 followers far outstripping the number of people following BP’s  genuine PR accounts – BP_America and Oil_Spill_2010 (I especially like the latter account name, with the 2010, just in case BP, you know has another spill next year, which I guess they’ll call 2011).

But its inability to grasp the crisis management nettle, is belied by the money it is throwing at its tarnished image. For instance, forking out $50m on an ad campaign is in pretty poor taste when there are plenty of people and causes affected by the spill on which the money would be far better spent. And it’s not even as if BP lacked (free) media and social media opportunities to get its message across.

But this blindness has been characeristic. David Binkowski of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association noted that BP didn’t begin its social networking campaign until a month after the oil started spewing. And, frankly, when it did, it might as well not have bothered.

But the most depressing, revealing, yet sadly, unsurprising, thing that has come out of BP’s social media ‘strategy’ is that it has so far failed to use the one word that is drilled into misbehaving kids from an early age – “sorry”.