It’s late August – and while the BP Gulf oil disaster may not be top news anymore, the aftermath and consequences for the environment and Gulf Coast economy are likely to be felt for decades. Sitting haplessly in the middle of the fray is BP — a textbook case for how not to handle your image in the face of disaster. In my mind, here are a few no-brainer crisis communications tenets that BP has violated:
#1 – Prepare for the worst. If I were going to take on the enormous technical challenge of drilling 5,000 feet under the ocean, I’d make sure I knew what I was doing – and would have thought through the worst case scenario. If BP had prepared for the worst, it might have plugged the leak much sooner and averted a PR crisis of epic proportions. Instead, what we saw were weeks of flailing around with top hats and top kills and all the other failed attempts that just served to make BP look more and more incompetent, until the well was finally plugged after more than 100 days.
#2 – Put your best foot forward. Make sure your public spokesperson is informed, not gaffe-prone, and genuinely sympathetic to the plights of the victims — in other words, everything BP CEO Tony “I want my life back” Hayward wasn’t. It’s astonishing that BP kept Hayward in such a public role for as long as it did. Read more…
Are you concerned about how green your workplace is? I’m not talking about the more obvious (and potentially higher-profile) green issues such as the sustainability of your building’s construction or the environmental impact of your company’s products, manufacturing processes, and packaging/shipping methods. I’m asking just how green your office is from day to day.
There hasn’t been this much hype about a new internet phenomenon since … I don’t know, maybe the dot-com bubble when everyone rushed out and changed their company name to “Something.com”, and had to hire an “Internet-specialist PR firm.” Right now “Social Media” is getting that same kind of attention. Will it live up to it? Should we all be jumping on the bandwagon?
One of my jobs at Wall Street is to maintain a list of the agency’s clients, including a short summary of what they do and a link to their company web sites. In adding NOA Audio Solutions to the list last week, I was gratified in more ways than one. First, it was nice to see that this is the eighth account Wall Street has added since the beginning of this year—a good accomplishment for an agency our size in the context of an economic downturn. Secondly, I was pleased that it was necessary to go no further than the first sentence on the NOA Audio web site to find a concise statement of what the company does: “NOA provides software and hardware tools for digitizing and managing archive essence material with a focus on audio archives.” Wow. If only every technology company were this clear and succinct about what they make and what it’s for. Then a lot more of them would be successful! After all, if you can’t explain what your company does in 25 or fewer meaningful words, then maybe it’s not such a necessity after all. How lucky we are to have clients like NOA Audio who have a clear idea of what they’re doing and can describe it without resorting to buzzwords. It makes our job so much easier. But don’t tell anyone I said that.
Many companies have either cut advertising or drastically reduced their spend in the trades for obvious reasons…. the economy. However, I’d like to make a case for why it is important to try to find the funds to continue to advertise, even just a little bit, in the trades – even in tough times./