British corporations reassess crisis PR stratagems in wake of BP spill
Six months on from the Deepwater Horizon spill which devastated the American Gulf coast some of Britain’s largest companies, including Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton are learning some valuable PR lessons from the disaster.
The Times reports that several the companies have commissioned in depth investigations of the incident, prompting execs to get together several times per year to role play various disaster scenarios in a bid to better prepare CEO’s for the unthinkable.
Boardroom staff are now treating social media as a much more potent force, conscious of the immense damage that a number of anti-BP websites, Facebook pages and Twitter feeds inflicted upon the oil giants image.
Over the Summer BP tested the “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” maxim to breaking point as the airwaves were saturated with coverage of the accident. In the weeks following the blast around a third of all television news broadcasts focussed on the spill.