BP's Nuance Crisis

There is a lot we can learn from BPs’ response. They are getting slammed for the way they are handling themselves in social. Three key points, I guess:


1.Death by Detail: Buying keywords on search engines is the right thing to do but it raises the bar on the credibility of the response. BP’s response web site is actually good. It’s full of facts and ways to keep up with how they are tackling the spill but...

...one image of a clean sunny beach undermined their credibility. No one buys it. In this case doing the right thing less than perfectly is worse than not doing it all.

2. Beware of the Meme: The CEO’s blurt that he “wanted his life back” went viral. In the old days a faux pas like this would have lived for a few news cycles. Now they never die and live on retweeting into infinity.

3. The Method is Message: The authenticity of communication is always important. In a crisis being anything less that 100% genuine can be worse than not doing anything at all.  Using traditional advertising as the method can undermine credibility if not used incredibly carefully. Too polished is not genuine and consumers feel like they are being “managed” rather than treated with intelligence.

It’s a tough one. In social media, BP is damned if they do and damned if they don’t. They stayed on the social media sidelines for a month and lost control of the medium. They then went in with both feet and have made some missteps. Lets face it, nothing they say is going to be received positively. Even trying to be “spin-free” isn’t working.

The biggest point is that it’s all about nuance. BP has to communicate how it's responding. That's a given. But any firm in crisis is under so much scrutiny and social media amplifies the problem exponentially. In this situation it's next to impossible to get people on your side but you have to avoid making it worse. As Communications experts our job is to look at everything through the hypercritical eyes of the consumer.  Every minute detail matters. It’s about playing hyper-defense.

- Adam Turinas