What’s your play in a disaster?

When that “never in a lifetime could you imagine” event happens, such as when BP’s “mostly working” approach to offshore drilling failed, leading to one of the worst oil disasters the world has ever been seen, two important questions emerge out of the slick. The first, raised by the company that everyone vilifies, in this case BP, “How do I improve my PR image during this disaster”, and the second, raised by the savvy entrepreneurs, “Can I solve this problem or get good PR out of this?”.  Two interesting articles speak to each of these perspectives.

The first comes from the Financial Post, “BP buys search term ‘oil spill’ from Google."  As unpopular as my viewpoint may seem (…and I hope Green Peace doesn’t hose me down with oil on this), this move by BP was ingenious – BP bought common Google search words related to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, such as “oil spill”, “volunteer”, and “claims” so that their website appears first or is ranked higher when internet users search those words.  Admittedly, though, the drastic drop in BP’s stock price over the past week suggests that a more ingenious idea might have been to actually stop the leak.  Note, the best PR move is to always solve the problem. 

The second article, “Is cleaning up the BP spill a matter of hair today, gone tomorrow?”, found in the The Vancouver Sun.  Here, a group of “gentle souls”, “angels”, “non-Spencer Pratt people (add your celebrity villain here)” have discovered an environmentally conscious way to clean up oil spills using human hair.  The reason I use such positive terms when commenting on this group, Matter of Trust, is that, instead of turning out a profit for their idea, like most of us entrepreneurs would have done, this group is a charity who receives donations from all over North America, including salons in Canada. Whether for altruistic reasons or not, salons that do donate their hair to Matter of Trust have a made an ingenious PR move.  

As young entrepreneurs, we may ask ourselves whether using financial resources to manipulate Google users crosses some sort of ethical line, especially when contrasted with the unselfish approach taken by Matter of Trust. At some point, you will have to decide what type of entrepreneur you want to be and what your bottom line is. How far would you be willing to go to preserve your image?