Managing Crisis in Public Relations: Case Study of Facebook and BP

Running head: PUBLIC RELATION
Public relation
Name of student
Name of University
Author note

1PUBLIC RELATION
Table of Contents
Facebook PR crisis.....................................................................................................................3
Statements as Facebook’s PR counsellor...................................................................................3
Suggestions to overcome the crisis............................................................................................4
Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook's Leaders Fought Through Crisis...........................4
BP Holding Statement................................................................................................................5
References..................................................................................................................................6

2PUBLIC RELATION
Facebook PR crisis
One of most recent crisis situations was faced by Facebook when during the year
2015, a consulting organisation named Cambridge Analytica was found to be accessing data
on 50 million of its users Due to this, there was a huge decline in stocks and thus the
company faced a major loss by losing more than $37 billion of the market value in just a
single day. It was a serious matter of crisis when the researcher of Cambridge University used
the Facebook app to extract the data of million of users and it caused a major crisis situation
(Watson, 2014). There had been a major breach of trust between Facebook, the social media
platform and Cambridge Analytica, which further resulted in loss of data and created major
issues leading to decline in market value for the company as well. It was a major crisis
because Facebook disclosed what it actually was known to it and thus the user privacy was
also hindered. This further resulted in disrupting the financial aspects and reputation of the
company, which went beyond the control and affected the openness and transparency level
too (Rahi, 2016).
Statements as Facebook’s PR counsellor
There were speculations about the involvement of right wing political consulting firm
that was funded by conservative donor named Robert Mercer and former White House
advisor Stephen Bannon, who were engaged with the crisis situation revolving around the
acquisition of data on more than 50 million Facebook users by using third party app. The data
was further acquired for the purpose of targeting the Facebook users involving political
advertisements aimed at influencing the behaviours and attitudes of people to support
campaign associated with Trump. Though it was a major scandal, still, as a PR counsellor, it
is to be noted that Facebook should allow the initial data to be accessed by the third party
application through considering the fact that proper rules and regulations are needed to be