I love passionate people

Grrrrr.

Grrrr pretty well sums up my thoughts on the matter. 

Very interesting – and ignorant. While I understand that they’re trying to “do the right thing”, when you’re fumbled something as badly as they did, you need to use a little more common sense. It’s easy for me, as someone who wasn’t affected by this, to say “Well, they’re trying…” – it’s a whole different ballgame when you’re someone who’s from there, works there, lives there, and was affected. I really think they dropped the ball on this. I think seeing “Sponsored by BP” at the end of those commercials is akin to reading “Too little, too late!”. It’s a shame – I honestly assumed they’d create an offshoot of their brand for this sort of thing. 

Tsk. Will these companies never learn?

BP obviously hasn’t learned.  Neither have they read “Excellence in Public Relations and Communication Management” by James Grunig.

They’re into the win-lose, zero-sum game (they win, we lose).  Their PR is still in the dark ages.  PR 2.0 is not fake press releases and spin, it’s two-way symmetrical conversation, problem-solving and conflict resolution.

And, the best thing is, if they start to engage people properly, it is not only THEY that have to fix it, it’s all of us, collaboratively, creatively, ethically.  The old assumption is that people are dumb and they’ll buy the fluff.  A big miscalculation, and we’re tired of the pitch.

As for TEPCO, oh boy.  Guess they all went to the same school.  Press releases and fluffy ads will fix it all (not).

I think that is the perfect sentiment for this!

It’s just so incredibly arrogant. They’re trying to BENEFIT fromt the freaking oil spill. See, you have me grrrr-ing again!

Well said, Bruce. Thanks for sharing your perspective.

Hi Mark,

I thought Amy had some great ideas about how BP could have handled these particular ads a bit better. I think they probably felt that they had to publicize their sponsorship of the ads, but a subtle change to the wording would probably have made it a bit more palatable… something like “Paid for by BP Cleanup Fund”.

I recently read tthe report below from Burson-Marsteller and I found it interesting that 79% of the companies that they surveyed thought they were less a year away from a PR Crisis, but 46% of those companies did not have a crisis management plan. I guess it is safe to say that BP is not the only company who could use some advice on crisis communications planning?

http://www.burson-marsteller.com/Innovation_and_insights/blogs_and_podcasts/BM_Blog/Documents/B-M%20and%20PSB%20Crisis%20Preparedness%20Study%202011.pdf

Love the convo Mark I agree with Amy and yourself. But BP actually has an ‘out’ if they wanted to take it. They could spin off the retail part of their business and then no one would ever know if the fuel they buy is from BP.

I do want to add my cynical side here. In 2010 the people of the gulf re-elected the anti-environment, deregulation reps to congress. So while I am mad at BP I don’t feel as bad for the people of the gulf states.

Definitely a great case study in PR

A selfless act would have been the better way to go. By bringing tourism back to the gulf coast, people would regain their livelihood. Instead they find themselves as pawns in an ad campaign to make BP look good. 

What people want to see from BP is human decency, unfortunately that won’t happen. 

You’re spot on here. The whole thing just seems so inept and offensive. Talk about needing to take a crisis management 101 class. Or perhaps one on Ethics.

If you watched the video, I think I explained my position rather clearly, and other people seemed to understand the point. I’m trying to think of a way to be more clear about the crass and arrogance of a company promoting themselves at the expense of the people they hurt, but I can’t come up with anything. Well have to agree to disagree, which is perfectly fine. Thanks for the dissenting comment.

I really appreciate the dissenting view. But here’s what I’ll toss back at you. I completely agree with your summary sentence. So if the goal is to drive tourists back to the coast, how is that served by promoting BP at the end? It doesn’t. It is completely self-serving, detracts from the message of the ad and only serves to associate a negative incident and brand with our coast. It works against the very goal you have set forth, right?

Thanks Kevin. That point seems so clear to me. It is such a bad move.

So you damned them for paying for the ads and putting their name on them to say they were paying for them.

I assume you would have damned them for the ads if you saw them and did not see BP’s name, therefore assuming that they should have paid for them, but were not.

Damned if they do, damned if they don’t.

Your assumption is incorrect, and in fact, I plainly said that would have been OK in the video.  Did you watch it before leaving that comment?

If they choose to place PR fluff where you (and the search engines) believe tourism ads should be, that’s not optimization by any stretch of the imagination. It’s manipulation. Optimization would be, in part, getting you what you want as quickly and efficiently as possible, no?

I can post a video of my dog eating peanut butter, call it “Facebook’s New Timeline Reviewed,” and buy a bunch of spammy links back to the video in an attempt to get people to watch it. That’s still not SEO. It’s search manipulation.

I am in full agreement with you that many companies do not care about optimization (the famed JCPenney’s link buying debacle comes to mind), but many SEOs really do care. For any goal and method though, there will always be someone willing to sell a product or service, so unfortunately, search manipulators will always have a market. Thankfully though, search engines will always be working to shut them down while not negatively affecting companies and SEOs attempting to make pages that truly answer the searcher’s question, infographics that actually provide some value, blog posts that bring real true insight to the reader, and so on.

Manipulators might call themselves SEOs, but it doesn’t mean that they are. Search engines rely on real SEOs for optimizing search. Schema.org is a great example of that.

I think they handled the spill so badly that they are going into overdrive trying to compensate for it with ads. 

I wrote a post recently about how airlines should stop focusing so much on social media and worry about the in-person service on the airlines, because that’s what people remember. It’s a similar situation…they screw up and then use social media to answer the criticisms. Why not just fix the problem?

BP stands for “Bad Press”.  I don’t think any amount of PR can clean up the mess…pun intended. Also, I think the underlying theme from day 1 is lack of trust and truth.  Their legal team was a part of this and I think they underestimated the power of social (as evidenced by the @FakeBP Twitter account which became viral and popular right after the accident).  Another thing we need to remember is that people died in that accident. 

Airlines?  Don’t get me started.

I didn’t realize I was learning anything
until I ran across a spanish chanel on the radio and I could actually
tell my wife what the commercial was about. I am hooked on the process.
 http://www.audiorosettastone.com/

Take a close look at their the BP America social media presence on Facebook. At a time when responsible companies are trying their best to use social media to build a dialogue with customers, shareholders and the general public, BP uses theirs as a fluffy travelog which is retro ’50s. It seems the company is oblivious to having any constructive dialogue with the communities along the Gulf Coast that it deeply impacted.  They have no true presence by a moderator, and it looks like Wild West shoot-outs with intern plants that post 24/7 on the page attacking and brow-beating Gulf Coast Activists.  BP gets a zero for community relations and social media savvy.  Their site would be a great case study on how “not” to manage a Facebook page. 

I love having these discussions with you. I’m so glad you hang out here!

I think that is the overall theme here. How can a company this big and important be so oblivious? They have the resources to hire the best guidance in the world.

Having said that … regarding Facebook, it is an interesting dilemma.  Putting emotion aside, should a company open up a Facebook page to comments if it knows it will receive violent diatribe 24/7?  Not just complaints.  Threats, hate, and a barrage of ugly commentary that can never be resolved?  

You bet! Wish more people were aware of what’s actually going on down there right now!

Good points. It really takes a professional communicator who can moderate 24/7 to engage two-way dialogue, manage dissent on a FB page and a corporate culture that understands the value in that.  In this case, you have a company that is still very much in crisis mode with it’s stock value issues and tarnished reputation and brand.  Even, FB is having growing pains.  Hopefully, you will see another evolution of social media dialogue as that platform transforms itself.   It’s up to professional communicators and the industry to transform that medium — not simply as a platform to “sell” product by corporations that want to “talk at you…” or paint a “rosy picture” without any realism to base it on.  Embrace the medium and develop relationships.  Suggestion to savvy social media pros: Don’t try to put the ad agency approach paradigm on it.  Corporations and brands will quickly lose public trust if the general public and audience thinks they’re being sold to or having the truth whitewashed. Just my opinion Mark.  Thanks for the convo and for raising key issues. 

BP has lied through their teeth about every aspect of this disaster, a disaster THEY created. If they had done the right thing from the outset, you could not have bought the kind of PR that would have come from their direct actions and vigillance and telling the truth. But instead there has been none of that. The rest of the country may be in the dark about what has gone on down here on the Gulf, but for those of us who call this place home, it is still a nightmare. And will be for years and years to come. There are too many who have become sick, too much damage to the environment by the use of the dispersants Corexit 9500 and EC 9527A when there were other options. In fact they are still being used. Try and find a news story anywhere on the national news networks about that and what is still going  here. You can’t. So is it any wonder that most folks around the country have no clue what’s happening here? Ask around and see how many of the locals are eating Gulf seafood. If BP spent as much money taking care of those people who lives they have affected and the marine life in the Gulf maybe it would be different. And don’t try to lay this B.S. on me about we are all responsible for this because we all drive cars. No jackass, BP is responsible and negligent period. In other words, this accident was avoidable. These PR ads are a joke. Ya’ll c’mon down the water’s fine!  Idiots!

I am really enjoy this communication by you, http://www.hererosettastone.com.