Hill+Knowlton Strategies

Last week we were reminded of the rare, but sometimes terrible consequences of working in remote places to secure energy supplies. In monitoring the situation unfolding in Algeria I was struck not only by the terrifying nature of the raid on the In Amenas facility, but also at the challenge of getting good information, by Governments, the firms involved and the media. Of course this is a very remote site, in the sands of the Sahara no less, so you would expect difficulties in getting reliable information. That said in these hyper-connected days the vacuum created by rolling news and live blogs on newspaper websites and Twitter was for an observer challenging. For those more closely involved it must have been intolerable.

In the weeks and months that follow BP, Statoil and Sonatrach together with their respective Governments and the wider industry will try to come up with a solution. There will no doubt be many suggestions though there was one thing that might help that occurred to me during a particular bulletin and that was the use of unmanned aerial vehicles.

Perhaps this has already been done by companies, but I suspect it hasn’t yet. I saw reports that the American military had used an unarmed UAV to monitor the situation at In Amenas. Of course the monitoring capabilities of these machines is vast with their specialist cameras. Their range is also extensive, their cost falling and the risks of using them very low. Will it really be that long before energy firms with remote assets start to deploy these machines?

It first struck me that it won’t be long before the media begin to use them. Watching rolling news over the last few days, there has been scant imagery showing events unfold. Only a few smartphone pictures ultimately made it to our screens. For families affected this must have been something of a blessing, but for bulletin editors used to having footage almost immediately of an event like this, it must have been a challenge. I really wouldn’t be surprised to see the first media drones (UAVs) circling above an unfolding story within a few years time.

So if the media look likely to invest to stay ahead of a developing story, I would also not be surprised to see companies investing in this technology in the coming years.

Of course the situation remains unclear still for some families and we hope and pray that there may still be some miraculous good news to come to those families who have had their lives thrown into turmoil.

Today energy major Total plugged the well at its Elgin platform the North Sea that has been leaking gas since March 25th this year. This is a great result and now will make the process of plugging the well more straight forward. The plans to drill a relief well, which have been run simultaneouslywith the Top Kill attempt, were well progressed, but estimates suggested this would take six months to complete. No doubt customers, officials at DECC and operators of nearby platforms will be relieved, a estimate suggested that up to 6% of the UK’s summer gas needs would be affected by the leak. Now that the leak has been stopped, hopefully production can be brought back online safely in the coming weeks. 

I expect too that those concerned about the environmental impact of the Elgin spill will also be relieved that the leak has been stopped. There will of course have been consequences for the local ecosystem as a result of the leak, but these have proven to be far less apparent than the impact of oil spills. It is this aspect of the spill that I wanted to focus on with this post.

Of course I am not overlooking the impact of this spill, but as this case has shown gas is not as visibly noxious as oil and the results of a spill are not as easy to convey visually, which impacts media interest. I remember Greenpeace had attempted to convey the impact with some high impact infra red images of the leak, but even these images didn’t get much traction. Had the leak caught fire then in terms of reputation this leak would have been far more catastrophic.

I think this chart neatly shows this in action (the horizontal axis is time and the vertical axis is number of posts). It’s small, but you can clearly see how interest has tailed off since the initial news of the leak and early speculation about the impact of the spill. The red line shows how this played out in mainstream media and the grey line shows Twitter posts. It is interesting that in contrast to the Macondo spill in the Gulf of Mexico, media interest has been far more muted and less persistent. Of course there are other differences including BP’s record in the US, the company statements that exacerbated media interest, the apparently different perspectives between BP and the White House etc, but one difference is telling and that is the visual impact of oiled birds and beaches versus the more intangible evidence of a gas leak at Elgin. 

It lead me to wonder a question to which I don’t know the answer, but would be fascinated to know and that is whether the risk profile and therefore cost of offshore gas developments factors in this lower reputational risk. I expect the differences in terms of risk are probably imperceptible, but from a reputational perspective this leak appears to have been far easier to manage for Total than Macondo was for BP.

The past week has seen two seemingly unconnected events spring to the headlines. On Monday, 25 people were killed in a West Virgina mine exposion (US). Just two days earlier, a Chinese coal carrier ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef. It’s still sitting there and so far has lost about three tonnes of oil into the sea.

I say “seemingly unconnected” because geographically the two events are about as far apart as you get. The respective industries are also unrelated.

However, according to the New York Times, the owner of the West Virginian mine escaped prosecution in 2007 despite a warning that it was showing a “potential pattern of violations”.

Similarly, the Courier Mail reports that as many as 10 ships a month use a network of small channels through the Great Barrier Reef as shortcuts to open ocean, in a bid to cut transit times and increase the profitability of voyages originating from mineral-rich Queensland.

However the same story also notes that the ship’s owner, the China Ocean Shipping (Group) Company or COSCO, has a recent history of maritime accidents.

There are two points to take out of these examples.

Firstly, that regulation exists for a reason. On the whole I think governments tend to want to minimise their footprint on a given industry because it costs a lot of money to play kindergarten cop – taxpayer money that could be spent on other things, like hospitals, schools or roads. However if industries want to play in the “self-regulated” sandbox, it’s beholden on those industries and their constituent companies to establish a strong framework within which to operate.

Secondly, the role of crisis communication has to shoulder a degree of blame in instances like these, whether that’s through public affairs channels or the daily news media. I see crisis communication as a tool that makes it possible for an organisation in a crisis to get back to doing business as usual as quickly as possible. I don’t believe there’s anything wrong with that, because intrinsically it means fixing the crisis itself.

Problems come up when people forget what they should be doing. By definition, public relations is a management function that’s concerned with building and maintaining mutually beneficial relationships between an organisation and its stakeholders (“the public”). At Hill & Knowlton we refer to it as Shaping Conversations, because as an external advisor that’s what we can do.

It’s not about press releases, parties and supporting the latest ad campaign. It is about maintaining an organisation’s right to operate in the eyes of the public. Too often, good crisis management helps organisations resolve serious problems, and then once the press office phones stop ringing everyone moves on.

That’s not good enough. Crisis managers should use the elevated adrenalin coursing through the Board’s collective system as motivation to change the way things are done. It requires an attitude shift – from constantly trying to look better, to constantly trying to be better. In established, highly-competitive industries such as shipping and mining this is often perceived as a costly albatross to carry.

This is the wrong view to have. People are more forgiving of companies that apologies when they make mistakes, make good when they cause harm, and improve their performance when something has gone completely awry. Serial offenders, on the other hand, raise public ire and draw heat from governments who are sensitive to voters’ demands for justice. That game can be far more costly.