Archive for June 3rd, 2010

As BP’s reputation slips further down the plughole, its PR strategy is beginning to look like an envelope without an address on it. The comms department believe big emotions come from big statistics. Lazy damage limitation tactics are fuelling the storm – they should be pouring oil on troubled waters metaphorically rather than allowing it to happen all too literally and panicking about how to respond.

And that’s the essence of it; the battalions of BP’s PR flaks are doomed because of the failure to fix Ground Zero. There’s a very thin line between success and failure in PR. For every day that the toxic spew gushes from the wound in the pipeline, the PR effort’s sheer futility becomes ever more obvious. If the engineers could only plug the leak, we would be viewing a completely different outcome. Read the rest of this entry »