BP: Good PR Battling Bad PR From Within

Most of the time, when PR practitioners are crafting crisis communications plans, they are imagining scenarios when something has gone terribly wrong and the company is going to have to battle an onslaught of negative publicity, generated by people outside the firm. Their key strategies include setting the record straight – making sure the facts are accurately reported – and reassuring the public that they are doing everything possible to effectively address the crisis at hand.

In that context, the public relations department at BP has done an outstanding job responding to the crisis created by the explosion and subsequent oil spill from its deepwater drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico. They have opened their doors to the press, providing them with details on the spill and containment efforts, and have run full-page ads assuring the public that the company was doing whatever it took to solve the problem and would pay for all of the damage to the region. They have even gone as far as making public a live video feed of the well, even as oil gushes out of it into the ocean waters, in order to create a sense of transparency.

The problem with BP’s public relations efforts, which have spurned almost as much news as the crisis itself, is that internally, it seems that the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. Invariably, just as the PR department’s carefully crafted ads show up in the daily newspapers of the affected Gulf Coast communities, BP executives are making comments about wanting to get on with their lives and about the “small people” whose livelihoods have been stripped by this situation. While the PR department is doing whatever it can to publicize BP’s containment and cleanup efforts, the company’s CEO is watching his yacht race off the coast of England. Whatever goodwill the PR department is trying to generate with the media and the public at large, is being drowned out by negative publicity created by its executives’ blunders.

The BP public relations fiasco underscores two important components to any public relations program. First is the issue of training. Just because an executive is good at running a profitable company, that does not mean he will automatically make a great spokesperson for the firm. Clearly, BP CEO Tony Hayward was not adequately trained by the PR department. Otherwise, he would have known better than to say something as stupid as he did about wanting the crisis to be over so that he could “get his life back”, right in the middle of a situation that had left 11 dead and countless others grieving the loss of their livelihoods as the oil contamination wiped out businesses across the Gulf Coast. He would have also known that taking the time out to make a personal visit (with photos) to the affected region would have made a positive PR impact, while taking time out on his yacht during the crisis would (and did) have a significantly negative impact.

The other component to a good PR program that has been executed poorly by BP is consistency. So many firms don’t want to take the time and effort necessary to ensure consistency across all of their communications channels – from the board of directors, across their marketing vehicles, down to individual sales people – and yet, it clearly makes a difference. The lack of consistency in BP’s messaging has cost the company a huge amount of credibility, in a time when credibility was crucial. The result? An erosion of public trust…and the loss of billions of dollars in market valuation, seriously affecting the portfolios and pensions of BP employees and stockholders alike.

Just as the Deepwater Horizon should serve as a lesson in disaster recovery and preparedness, so BP’s public perception crisis should serve as an important lesson in PR and corporate communications. It is not enough to have a plan in place. Consistency must be maintained throughout an organization’s communications venues, and one of the ways to do that is to make sure it starts at the top, with a well-trained executive.

To learn more about how we can help you maintain more consistency in your PR and marketing communications programs, call 832-372-4798 or visit http://www.lindawisepr.com/.