Reputation management lessons in the wake of BP Oil spill, Toyota recall and more http://bit.ly/sym57Y

Article by Tina

The recent BP oil spill has yet again tossed up the inevitable query of whether your company is prepared to face a reputation onslaught. The valuable lessons learned from the BP oil spill, Toyota recall, and Goldman Sachs fraud charges show just how only a few companies are prepared for a crisis. The fact is that most of the crisis events are not unexpected though these could be unpredictable at times.

According to Oxford-Metrica, in the next five years, 83 percent of companies will face a crisis that will adversely affect their share price by 20 - 30%. Still, companies do not seem to care; most of them fail to learn from the past mistakes and often tend to repeat it. A rewind to the late 80s would tell you about how BP had underplayed the impact of oil spill as negligible. Nothing has changed ever since. Soon after the devastating New Mexico spill this year, BP's CEO Tony Hayward told the Guardian that "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."

Remembering the past and learning the lessons the hard way does not seem to be the BP's way of functioning. Although BP was caught unawares by the oil spill crisis, its carefully crafted online reputation involving multi million dollar pay per click campaign also seems to be heading for a dead end as the majority of the public is not willing to buy the story and Google already creating the Crisis Response: Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill.

However, the very fact that BP pumped around $ 250,000 to create the official YouTube channel for BP America on its Gulf of Mexico response to the oil spill, suggests that BP is well aware of the fact that the public relations impact of this oil spill is likely to be very significant. Small, medium or large, all the companies need to have a fool proof reputation management plan in place, which would double up as a crisis management tool at times of need. Remaining cut off from the public in an ivory tower wont work out any longer because with the advent of online forums and communication channels, nothing remains hidden from the public eye for long!