#A little bird told me: birdcaging the message during the BP disaster

Abstract

The purpose of crisis planning is to prepare for the inevitable. This paper examines BP's crisis response following the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion and the subsequent environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. This event severely damaged BP's corporate standing, and the company's response and management of the crisis and cleanup exacerbated the damage to BP's reputation. The company's crisis communication strategies failed amid an onslaught of online and social media commentary from traditionally passive stakeholders and activists. The resultant damage to the company's reputation saw $95B wiped off the company's equity value and the CEO forced to resign. It is shown that crisis planning needs to be continually reviewed to take account of the evolving nature of social media during a crisis; in this instance, the use of Twitter proved particularly damaging to BP. Rolling crisis plans that encompass all media are required to provide the conclusive and swift action necessary to minimise the impact of a crisis.

A model of trust-repair discourse

“…While this topic has generated substantial scholarly interest (e.g. Breeze, 2012;Choi, 2012;Diers and Donohue, 2013;Harlow et al, 2011;Harlow and Harlow, 2013;Howell et al, 2014;Muralidharan et al, 2011;O'Connor, 2011;Schultz et al, 2012;Smithson and Venette, 2013;Wickman, 2013), none of the previous studies has, in fact, investigated it from the point of view of trust repair.…”