Congratulations to Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz who celebrate the sixth anniversary of their podcast For Immediate Release this week. Each week Hobson and Holtz spend an hour digging under the headlines in communications and PR. It has become a regular part of my media diet.

Hobson and Holtz recently recorded a special show with two communication professionals involved in the response to the BP Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill arguably one of the largest crisis communication efforts of the last year.

It’s a candid discussion of BP’s communication effort around Deepwater Horizon with two of the senior professionals involved in the response; Neil Chapman, a BP staffer that has spent much of his career working on high profile public affairs issues, and Gerald R. Baron, president and founder of Baron & Company, a US marketing and public relations firm in and author of the Crisisblogger blog.

Here’s what I learnt.

• BP lost credibility early in the crisis through the action of its CEO Tony Hayward. The response to the crisis was led by the business and not by the communication team who had to work with the decisions made by the business.
• You can’t PR away a crisis. The emphasis has to be on good accurate and timely information. In BP’s case it set up a crisis site and local state sites. BP made a massive amount of content available to the media and responded to every incoming email, SMS and phone call.
• BP holds regular crisis communications activities but nothing could have prepared the organisation for an event this large. 45,000 people have been involved in the response effort including an estimated 300 in communications.
• This was a crisis it wasn’t a PR crisis. It’s an ongoing oil disaster that resulted in the tragic loss of life and unprecedented damage to the natural environment and livelihoods.
• In evaluating the PR response Chapman said that crisis communication fundamentals haven’t changed with the emergence of social media but now more people want to be involved in the response.
• Spoof Twitter feeds such as @BPGlobalPR with its 180,000 followers are an inevitable part of a modern PR crisis according to Baron. Managing how you deal with these has to be part of your crisis planning.
• BP didn’t challenge any of the misreporting. Baron said that organisations should consider rebuttal as a means of correcting errors in media reporting. He suggested that organisation implement a web-based fact checking system.