Next month (January 20) I’m one of the speakers at Communicate magazine’s Reputation in Oil, Gas and Mining conference. It looks set to be a good conference as there are some great speakers and it comes at a time when the extraction industries are facing increasingly complex reputational issues. There have been tremendous marketing and communications challenges for oil, gas and mining firms in the past few years, compounded by a sometimes feral press, a crowded – and varied – NGO sector, and a consumer audience armed with potent new communication tools.
I’m there speaking about the impact of social media on corporate communications and issues management:
What price anti-social?
Social media is providing the oil, gas and mining industries with a fantastic new set of communications tools. However, it brings with it a loss of message control that can be frightening. How can you regain that control? Should you be trying to do so? Our speakers discuss the possible reputational damage of social media and how communicators can harness it.
Other speakers include David Bickerton, director of communications, BP; James Hughes, Manager Sustainability Report & Indices, Shell; David Yelland, partner, Brunswick and Philip Dewhurst, senior partner, College Hill and former head of communications at both Gazprom and BNFL.
Communicate always offers a discount for friends of their speakers so be sure to mention that you read about the conference on my blog and you’ll get a £100 discount.
Sorry to say this but they are in the dark ages. Most of them are greenwashing. Most are pretending to be green. Most of them need to read a book like Trust Agents. Trust is at serious low with the public.
BP needed to apologise and they needed to say do it fast. They need to go back to PR school. The power of saying sorry to the American people could saved BP and Hayward alot of trouble. Reading PR week this year no one in the PR industry even took such a cock-up seriously. Vox Pop on the street showed the public say it as someones elses problem. The chat was still happening online. Oilspill trending for as long as it took to get rid of Hayward.
These companies are not representing us well.
Dara Bell