British Petroleum’s (BP’s) failure to adequately enlist social media in the communications battle over the BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill made picking a single video clip of the month too difficult. So I’ve chosen two BP commercial spoofs, both highlighting BP’s growing credibility gap as it desperately tries to control information and ignores the new (social media era) communication rules: collaboration, openness, transparency, and timeliness.
While BP is on Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and YouTube, the information and images it’s sharing are either out-of-date and wrong or way too obviously sanitized. As Glen Gilmore wrote in an excellent blog post on BP and the social media battleground:
Looking at the collection of photos uploaded at the bpAmerica Flickr stream, one might think that BP’s work crews had been sent to the wrong beaches and waters, as the ones shown in their photographs have shining white sand and clear waters…. Nicely-polished productions and squeeky-clean images are precisely the sort of content that makes board members smile – and the rest of the public go elsewhere for their information.
In this case, the public has turned to satirical YouTube videos, such as a Lady Gaga BP gingle and my below two picks for video clip of the month; a BOYCOTTbp Facebook fan page; and a fake Twitter account. @BPGlobalPR pokes fun at the real oil giant’s public relations campaign with tweets such as:
- We are very upset that Operation: Top Kill has failed. We are running out of cool names for these things.
- If we’re being accused of being criminals, we want to be tried by a jury of our peers- wealthy execs who don’t give a damn. #fairisfair
- A bird just stole my sandwich! You deserve everything you get, nature!!! #bpcares
- I’m sorry, are people mad at us for drilling in the ocean?!? Maybe God shouldn’t have put oil there in the first place. DUH. #bpcares
- BP: Cross you fingers and pray for our riskiest operation yet. We sent Terry to get the lunch order.
Apparently, BP’s communications strategies aren’t going to leave the 1980s anytime soon. BP just hired Anne Womack Kolton, a former spokeswoman for Vice President Dick Cheney, to be its public face for the disaster. While at Cheney’s side, Kolton was an ardent defender of secrecy, and she comes from the Brunswick Group, the international communications and crisis management firm running BP’s failed public relations response. While I could be surprised, I suspect this “change” will only lead to more of the same. It’ll be interesting to watch and find out.
I’m so glad I sold all my BP stock earlier this year! Enjoy the videos.
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I disagree that BP’s PR team is stuck in the ’80s. Threatening to arrest reporters for going to certain areas and banning them from others (see http://thinkprogress.org/2010/06/02/bp-oil-animals-death/) reminds me of the way the U.S. miitary operates in the present (e.g., Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, etc.).
Thanks for commenting on my post. Yes, BP’s strong-arm tactics with the media do seem to resemble the military’s. Presumably, BP isn’t hiring former military propagandaists who don’t realize they’re operating in a different strategic environment. Keeping the media away from the oil spill obviously is not a matter of national security. More importantly, propaganda’s smoke-and-mirrors only fool for so long. If all that secrecy helps you dupe the opposing military into thinking you’re invading a different city than the one you really plan to invade, by the time the opposing military figures it out, it’s too late. You didn’t need to fool anybody long-term anyway. BP, on the other hand, might love to fool the world long-term, but that isn’t possible, so using military strategies wouldn’t make any sense. BP would only end up destroying its credibility over time and would having nothing equivalent to a military victory to show for it.
I beg to differ. All good flacks know that if you get your highly spun story out first, you’ll grab the media’s attention and get more play than later corrections. That way the public will only remember your account. You can also release bad news on Fridays (or better yet, Fridays before holiday weekends) to minimize coverage when the media is short staffed. The public may never hear your bad news or will get it with minimal analysis. I firmly believe smoke and mirror tactics definitely do work.
Huh! Why would you hire the PR spokesperson for someone whose approval ratings were lower than those of swine flue? All we can expect is more obvious lying, bullying, denying and general bull.
Thanks for taking the time to comment on my blog. Your comment (plus Jeffrey’s two above) remind me of a quote from the Nazi propaganda czar Joseph Goebbels: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
While perceptions may lag reality in the short-term, even Goebbels (my vote for the nickname “Darth Vader”) doubted you could maintain a lie over time… and he thought that way before the Web 2.0 age!
This is your best writing yet!