Bad Juju for the South

Somebody put the gris gris on south Louisiana and the gulf coast: first Hurricane Katrina, then Hurricane Gustav, then the British Petroleum oil spill, combined with other natural disasters in between. The BP spill intrigues me for a few reasons. First, I come from an oil family, so anything oil-related automatically grabs my attention. My grandpa was a petroleum engineer, and the export of the 5th and 10th millionth barrels of oil out of Kuwait happened under his leadership; my uncle is a geologist and has worked around the world looking for the perfect spot to drill; and my dad is an oil and gas attorney, also working around the world for Exxon and Halliburton. Second, my husband’s family, who lives in south Louisiana, was directly impacted by the BP spill. His uncle, who is a tug boat captain, and his cousin, who was 15 at the time, decided to pack up their bags and help with the clean up. And the money must have been pretty good: by the end of that summer, his uncle had a new Cadillac and his cousin had saved enough money to buy a truck for his 16^th birthday.

The way BP handled the crisis communications after the spill was…interesting; proper media training on the part of former BP CEO Tony Hayward might have gone a long way, and he might have learned to not say things along the lines of “I want my life back” and “the spill is relatively small when compared to the rest of the ocean” (Daniels, 2011, p. 240). It was just a few days after those comments that the U.S. government said it would be handling the communications process from then on, not BP. One such theory as to why the government stepped in when it did is because the Obama administration did not want the BP spill to become “Obama’s Katrina” (Daniels, 2011, p. 240). The article BP: A Year Later argues that companies need to sense political tension and be able to communicate the crisis on their own so the political climate does not get in the way of the communications plan.

“BP's response to the explosion should have been a collaborative, well-coordinated effort that would have given the emergency response a single, authoritative voice” (Daniels, 2011, p. 240). Instead, through the use of social media, BP wasn’t always able to completely control the message that got out, making the “planned response too slow, disconnected and inadequate for the task” (Daniels, 2011 and Majcharzak, A., Jarvenpaa, S. & Hollingshead, A., 2007, p. 147).

The public relations campaign following the spill focused on several main points: big oil, employment, seafood, tourism, the south and BP (Daniels, 2011). BP was able to use employees as ambassadors to let the world know the south is back open for business and the beaches are just as good as they were before the spill. They were able to tell the world that the seafood people were eating was actually OK. You might remember a series of commercials highlighting New Orleans with famous chefs like Emeril Lagasse and John Besh telling everyone to come back to Nola, and kids on the beaches telling the viewer to come back down to Gulf Shores.

Did you buy the BP public relations campaign? Do you know anyone affected by the spill, or did you avoid Gulf seafood following the spill, even when we were told it was OK to eat? I’d love to hear your thoughts.


References:


Daniels, C. (2011). BP: A year later: from BP to the Gulf Coast to the general practice of crisis comms, last April's Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill continues to have a powerful impact, PR Week, Feb. 2011 (240).


Majcharzak, A., Jarvenpaa, S., and Hollingshead, A. (2007) Coordinating Expertise Among Emergent Groups Responding to Disasters, Organization Science, Vol. 18 No. 1, pp.147-161.