The BP Oil spill is rapidly approaching Florida’s beautiful beaches and continues its destruction of the environment, of wildlife and people’s livelihoods in the Gulf of Mexico. The video footage and still photography showing the disaster’s impact on water fowl is starting to come in. In this AP video you can see some of the disaster’s impact, as oil covered birds struggle to breathe.
Meanwhile in a fitting example of the power of social media, a pun social media Twitter account @BPGlobalPR continues its devastating tweets on the impacts of the oil slick. When I first looked at this Twitter account last week, it had ~20,000 followers, it is now at well over 122,000, reflecting the potency of this environmental disaster and the anger at BP’s mismanagement of not only the disaster, but also the communication about the disaster.
With BP CEO Tony Hayward continuing his verbal faux pas, the company has taken the brilliant step of hiring Dick Cheney’s PR adviser, Anne Womack Colton (of the secretive Cheney energy task force fame) and spending a massive amount on a new PR and advertising campaign.
Among the comments Hayward has made regarding the oil spill are the following:
“I’m sorry. We’re sorry for the massive disruption it’s caused their lives. There’s no one who wants this over more than I do. I’d like my life back.”
“The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.”
“What the hell did we do to deserve this?”
“There aren’t any plumes.”
Here’s the BP ad with Tony Hayward claiming full responsibility, unfortunately given the company’s track record I doubt the sincerity of their marketing message.
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