Oil is one of the
most prominent resources in our country today. Oil can be found along the countryside,
or in the depths of the deep sea. . A lot of good can, and has come from the distribution
of this product (average of 23.9 billion/year) On the flip side, there can be faults
within the system (i.e. rigs, wells pumps, etc…) With every success, and there
can be a crisis. If a crisis occurs, the way an individual, or in this case, a
corporation handles the situation can either lead to an up rise or downfall of
the company? For the purpose of this paper, I will focus on British Petroleum.
When
asked if I though the pr was too good for the BP oil spill, I immediately
thought of Tony Hayward, the Former Chief executive of BP. When a disaster with
such great magnitude is mentioned, I believe that if the company itself
overshadows the incident that has occurred, then the pr firm representing BP
has either failed miserably or flourished with the social media of the
incident.
The first release
from Tony Hayward, he announced that, “ As an industry, they must fully
participate in these investigations and not rest until the causes of this
tragedy are known and measures are taken to see that it never happens again.”
The next couple of statements have the same tone, but as the spill gets
progressively worse, Hayward’s demeanor takes a turn for the worst. He was
quoted, “I just want my life back” and seen on a yacht for a weekend get-a-way
with his son. Things like this are
one of the reasons that the pr was not good for BP. The perception of Hayward
took a turn for the worst. He
looked as if he did not care about the spill or the families that lost someone
in the explosion. The last thing a corporation wants is for the face of their
company to be seen as a heartless monster. You want to the public to trust the
face/spokesperson of the company. Obama himself said that after some of the
remarks made by Tony Hayward, “I would have fired him on the spot” Hayward
should have been more careful about what he said. He apologized for some of the
things he said as he left BP, but it was too late. He had become the villain of
the crisis, or “The most hated man
in America” as he said himself. While he was busy trying to get his life back,
he was also diminishing the accountability of his, now former company.
The
next thing that I believe brought down that face of BP, from a pr standpoint,
was how BP began to divert the attention from their company. Quickly pointing
the blame at the companies involved. For example, BP was quick to say that the oilrig
belonged to drilling contractor, Transocean
LTD, but they stood beside them with full support. Another example would be
that in one release I read British
Petroleum began to reference to the spill as, “ Gulf of Mexico Spill”,
while the majority of the other releases I read referred to it as the, “BP oil
spill”. Anadarko Petroleum Corp.
accused BP of being, “Grossly negligent and of willful misconduct.” British Petroleum as a company should
have taken the fall and worked out the details behind closed. It doesn’t matter
who is involved, BP was the front force of this spill. That’s what the country
saw. The many instances where they were so quick blame someone else; they were
just making the company look weak and untrustworthy.
All of these
errors put BP at fault for a huge disaster. As I said before with fault, there
can be success. The one thing that I feel British
Petroleum did thrive in was the amount of social media they used. From the
initial Press release sent out, from that day forward, they released a
statement almost daily. With the intentions of keeping the world informed with
the crisis at hand, they also dedicated a section of the BP website to the oil
spill. There you could, and still can find every press release from the day of
the explosion, the first press release of the oilrig, etc… BP also had a
twitter, as most corporations do, and there they tweeted a hotline that people
could call if they saw oiled wildlife. As well as commercials, everyone watches
TV, so this was a great way to gain the attention of those who weren’t as
aware. As I said before, I commend BP for their efforts. They kept the public
in the know just as pr should.
In conclusion, I
think they could have put a different front man up as soon as Tony Hayward
began to make the snide comments that he did, and that would have prevented a
lot of the controversy. As I said at the beginning, you could take the pr in
one of two ways; the fact that Hayward sticks out in my mind is because he was
ridiculed. The effects of the oil spill were and still are updated daily. The
constant tweets, and releases keep people in the know and less worried about
that crisis at hand. As for pointing the blame on the other companies, just
simply stating that as a company, you are trying to fix the task at hand, would
have been enough, with a few details of course. I believe that this was in
fact, one of the biggest natural disasters in my time. People have different
views and opinions, which is what makes America, America. With that being said,
the pr for the BP oil spill was good. There is something learned from each
experience. With hopes of no natural disaster to occur in the future, that will
not happen. So hopefully companies will look at this crisis and learn how to
manage a little better.
Work Cited
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jun/29/bp-oil-spill-timeline-deepwater-horizon
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