It’s official. The BP oil spill now is the worst in US history, surpassing the Exxon Valdez according to an article in today’s NY Times. The toxic oil spewing from the broken well for more than a month has damaged fragile wetlands and the livelihoods of Louisiana watermen for years to come. We don’t even know what the full scope of this spill will be.
But there is another failure–one of the company to communicate honestly and quickly, a classic failure of crisis communications. BP, who for years positioned itself as environmentally friendly, has lost its credibility. Reputations like ocean ecosystems and wetlands are fragile. To repair them takes a long time if they can ever be fully repaired. That CEO Tony Hayward could say that the spill is “modest” was either incredibly stupid or arrogant or both. The company can run all the full page ads in newspapers that it wants but the public is angry and they should be. There is now a fake Twitter site @BPGLOBALPR that has almost 10 times as many followers as the real BP site. People have lost whatever trust they had in BP.
An article in the Washington Post a few weeks ago talked about how BP was distancing itself from the crisis by calling it the Gulf of Mexico spill so as not to attach its name to it. There is no greenwashing this story.
I keep asking where are the PR folks in terms of counseling the company to tell their story honestly. Maybe they are providing that counsel and management isn’t listening. Or maybe the lawyers are winning out. Seems that BP may go down in history as short hand for disaster of Biblical Proportions.
What do you think of the BP crisis response?
