Much of the region’s [nonfishing boat] businesses — particularly the hotels — have been prospering because so many people have come here from BP and other oil emergency response teams.
The Wall Street Journal recently busted BP as being responsible for this flackery. The company has deployed a team of writers to self-publish content about the disaster in the Gulf — and apparently, this was the best they could do.
I frequently advise companies to self-publish their own content, and I often point to a quote from Reuters columnist Felix Salmon as a reason why: “When PR people offer me interviews, my first response is always to simply say that the would-be interviewee should blog his or her thoughts, and then I can link to them. Better for both of us.”
Moreover, the mainstream press is shrinking, but the amount of news that legitimately deserves coverage isn’t. So companies that self-publish well can help fill that void when they aid in the process of objective reporting. It’s a contemporary PR tactic, and PR has always blurred that delicate line between reporting and advertising because it is an industry comprised of self-styled yet newsworthy content intended to resemble journalism.
But good ideas are often executed poorly. I would guess that BP isn’t letting its writers report so much as its forcing them to wedge corporate talking points into strings of prose. That isn’t awfully helpful to anyone, and in fact the strategy has backfired to make BP look foolish and profoundly out-of-touch. I have a hard time believing that the people responsible for coming up with the idea to put “BP reporters” down in the Gulf are the same people editing their copy.
I stick with my original advice — that BP should focus on self-publishing its own news as a response to the disaster in the Gulf — but once the company decided to go there it should have put the full strategy in the hands of people who know what they’re doing. It doesn’t seem to have done that.
