[tweetmeme]As the Gulf oil disaster continues to escalate and BP is faced with another failure to stop the gushing “black gold,” BP CEO Tony Hayward has been spending his time sticking his foot in his mouth.  For any company, the CEO is the chief communications officer.  Where are his PR advisors with the crisis communications plan?  Just two weeks ago in this video he was predicting a “very modest impact” of the spill.  Now an underwater oil plume some 22 miles wide is threatening the food chain and is predicted to reach the Florida Panhandle’s famous sugar-white beaches by Friday.  Even as Hayward spoke, wildlife was washing up on beaches coated in oil and fishermen sat by their empty boats as the disaster unfolded before their eyes.

Then, just this week, Hayward acknowledged that the spill is a “catastrophe” but also claimed that he “wanted his life back.”  Is he kidding?  His company’s alleged shortcuts may have caused the worst oil spill in this country’s history, disrupting millions of lives, wrecking the environment and causing billions in cleanup costs and lost productivity.  The people living on the coastline want their lives back, too, but they can’t fly to the U.K. to escape the disaster.  I can hardly think of another CEO being so tone deaf.  Instead, he should be saying, “I’ll be on top of this until we solve the problem so people can get their lives back.”  Theirs, not his.

Here is a video in which he makes his infamous claim:

It’s difficult to believe that a major oil company like BP doesn’t have a crisis communications plan in place, not only for managing the cleanup, but with the key messages the CEO should be communicating to the public.  I’m sure that Mr. Hayward is a decent man and is sincerely sorry for this mess.  But he needs to stay on message about what the company is doing to solve the crisis and be sensitive to the horrible disruption it is causing to people and the environment.  Words do count.  And people are listening.

Schools are closing and the World Health Organization (WHO) raised its global flu pandemic level.  So far, the outbreak of swine flu has killed relatively few people and many experts feel the risk maybe overstated.   But just maybe, maybe one of those statistics could be the CEO of your company.

Does your company have a crisis communications plan in place specifically addressing a global pandemic?  Not likely.  The last scare was the Avian flu outbreak a couple of years ago.  According to a Deloitte & Touche survey of 100 companies in the U.S. last year, two-thirds of the companies had not planned adequately for the avian flu and there was no one in charge of such a plan.  By contrast, 80 per cent of corporate officials surveyed at a conference in Hong Kong had people and plans in place because of reported deaths in Asia.

So it may just take the death of a prominent CEO of a U.S. company to scare companies into finally putting a crisis communications plan in place that covers not only disasters in a manufacturing facility, or a rumor about a product recall, but also one for a possible global pandemic.

This morning’s newspapers were filled with stories about two Domino’s Pizza employees videotaping a prank in which they do pretty disgusting things to a pizza they were preparing for delivery.  They put the video up on YouTube and the rest is history.  The viral community swiftly carried the story to a world-wide audience eager to spread the dirty word about Domino’s.  Too late, the company realized that the traditional response — send out a press release and hope for the best wasn’t going to work.   This is the lesson they learned.

The company has since opened an account at Twitter and the comments are beginning to turn positive.  But the damage to the company’s reputation will take a long time to heal.  And the company still isn’t using all the viral tools at its disposal — at the writing of this post, the company had nothing on its corporate website to reassure its customers nor a link to its Twitter account.  This may be a calculated decision, but they need to be in control of the message.  It is naive to think that customers and investors aren’t online getting the most up-to-date commentary on the crisis.  Shouldn’t the company’s official website be carrying the key messages the company wants to communicate?

Did Domino’s have a crisis communications plan in place for this kind of event?  As a company in the food business, didn’t they know that the potential for bad news — food contamination high among them — could turn into a reality they would need to address?

Savvy companies will stay tuned into the viral community 24/7 and be ready to respond at the speed of light — which is the speed at which news about a company circles the universe.