BP, What Are You Thinking?

BP has a PR disaster of mammoth proportions on its hands with the actual oil spill.

So why do they continue to soil their image even more with insensitive remarks from the highest level of the company? Maybe both the BP CEO and the Chairman need a little PR 101.

Both have made public statements that are clear PR blunders. This is like pouring salt into an open wound of a public disaster. And that sticks in the crawl of all the people who are suffering out there. Even worse, they've given the media some pretty pithy sound bites to play over and over.

Even a student in PR 101 should know not to say this:

I want my life back, whined a weary Tony Hayward, BP's CEO. Well, yeah Tony. And so do the millions of people whose lives are now on hold, not to mention the sea animals who have and will lose their lives thanks to the tragedy.

We care about the small people, said BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg, by way of explaining that BP is not just a greedy company that doesn't care. Okay, to be fair, we all know what he really meant and there's that pesky language barrier that made him apologize later for speaking clumsily. But a company like BP should have access to some of the top media trainers in the business. Where are they and why are BP officials speaking publicly without them?

The PR gaffes are a little breeze in the midst of the oil-spill tempest and, if BP makes good on its promises to restore the health and well-being of that which it has damaged, all just could be forgotten. But then again, video shot today can have an extrordinarily long shelf life. Can you say YouTube?