BP fiasco lessons: surviving an online reputation crisis

Tim Shier

Alex Rees

Created a maelstrom

Live video feeds of the spill and constant, accurate updates have created a maelstrom of anti-BP commentators and a staunch base of concerned citizens. The brand has taken a beating from angry individuals, influential opinion leaders and, notably, the satirical spoof Twitter account @BPGlobalPR, whose administrator offers gems such as: "Free speech is an American thing. We're a British company. You do the math."

That this spoof account has almost 184 000 followers, which is more than 10 times those following the real BP Twitter account, @BP_America, is an apt illustration of the power of the speeding bullet that is social media. This bullet seems to have pierced the heart of BP's share price, which has plummeted by tens of billions of US dollars. The cost of responding to the crisis promises to generate similar losses.

Here at BrandsEye, we were interested to note that the attack on the BP brand has been largely consumer-driven, with consumers being responsible for 85% of all negative mentions. In a 24-hour period, the results were alarming. In just one day, the environmental disaster caused by BP was mentioned online 12 426 times. These mentions reached an audience of 52 730 040 people, equating to R11 962 374 worth of negative PR for the BP brand.

"Topic is far weighter"

"Interestingly, while the attack on BP is predominately being driven through Twitter, with 55% of all mentions originating on the social networking site, it is also taking place elsewhere on the web and has been a popular topic on thousands of blogs. This indicates that the topic is far weightier than the usual consumer complaints trending topics that take place on Twitter," notes Greg Schneider, a reputation analysis for BrandsEye.

Was BP prepared to manage its online reputation in the face of such a powerful backlash? It seems doubtful, as negative online conversation continues to abound. So how does one mitigate the losses when facing an online reputation crisis?

There are several steps a brand can take to get back its reputation onto the road to recovery:

The first of these is monitoring and planning. Like the Girl Guides, your brand needs to be prepared. If your business has systems in place to monitor and adequately deal with negative conversation online, response times will be faster and the crisis will hopefully be reigned in before it spreads like wildfire across social networks and does irreparable damage.

Filtering has become increasingly important

Monitoring should ideally involve an online reputation management system or, at the very least, Google Alerts. With the amount of content online, filtering has become increasingly important and online reputation management tools offer a way to cut through the clutter and determine what is really being said about your brand and which sectors it is coming from - consumers, press, competitors or other stakeholders.

In conjunction with this, delineating a process to follow in the event of online chaos will stem panic during a flood of negative public sentiment and ensure that everyone knows what they need to do.

Possibly the most damaging thing that a brand can do is to ignore or deny responsibility for the events that have caused its reputation crisis. An honest, transparent response is key to addressing the problem and is vital to rebuild trust and respect and a stony silence will only serve to cement negative perception.

An example of this occurred in early 2010, when Toyota was forced to recall over 8.5 million vehicles in four months due to acceleration and braking problems. Its initial lack of response was criticised as indicating an attitude of smugness within the company and further alienated customers.

Replacing negative with positive

However, perhaps on realising the gravity of the crisis (the company shares [http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/feedarticle/8921329 fell by 15%]] over four days), Toyota took steps to manage its online reputation. This brings us to the third important step in an online crisis - search engine optimisation (SEO) and replacing negative conversation with positive.

In the case of Toyota, other automotive brands had gone so far as to purchase keywords relating to the recall and use them to advertise their own offering. Toyota took action by finally taking ownership of the problem and generating informative content on owned channels. A devoted channel was managed to provide information and deal with queries and a branded Twitter channel, named "Toyota Conversation", was created to aggregate conversations around the recall and offer the brand an opportunity to address them.

The top three results on the Google search engine results page (SERP) for "Toyota recall" are all Toyota-owned and new positive content around the brand has contributed to the process of moving on.

Importance of expertise and experience

The final point to consider when addressing an online reputation crisis is the importance of expertise and experience.

Businesses can consider employing outside assistance, such as a digital or PR agency. Alternatively, people within the organisation can take the opportunity to educate themselves on social media, WebPR and online reputation management. There are several online courses available so take the time to research the options and select the course that is best suited for the needs of your business and which will have the most positive impact on your online reputation.

For more:

• Newsvetter.com: The rise of fake PR and how to manage it