Public relations in the energy industry

Summary: Public relations is the planned actions of a business, trade association, or an opposing group to put forth its message to the public through the media. The object is to be viewed favorably by the public and often to sway opinion to generate change.

Public opinion is a factor determining the fate of the energy industry. Public relations therefore plays a critical role for both energy companies and environmental organizations. As one of the first industries to use public relations services, the energy industry is now very skillful in publicity techniques. Environmental organizations, watchdogs over energy companies, are proficient in using framing as a public relations tool and conducting their own public relations campaigns with Websites and newsletters.

In the 2020s, more than 80 percent of Americans report that they are environmentalists. There are approximately 150 nationwide environmental organizations and more than 12,000 grassroots groups concerned with environmental issues. The high environmental awareness poses a challenge for the energy industry, which is seen by many of these groups as a major polluter.

If the energy industry or one of its sectors ignores public relations, the results can be disastrous, as demonstrated by the rapid demise of nuclear power in the 1970s and 1980s and the moratorium on offshore oil drilling in the 1990s. Until the late 1970s, a majority of Americans supported nuclear power. However, the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island dramatically lowered the public support, which dropped from 50 percent in January 1979 to only 39 percent in April of that year. Congress and state governments then imposed increasingly costly regulations and licensing hurdles on nuclear power plants. Despite its wealth and power, the nuclear industry began to die. In the 1980s and 1990s, as oil prices fell, Americans began to want to preseve the nation’s coastal beauty and turned against offshore oil drilling. The oil industry has gained little access to offshore oil fields since then.

Public relations professionals, who use their expertise to influence and maintain public opinions and attitudes, thus play a critical role in the energy industry.

Evolution of the Energy Industry’s Public Relations

The energy industry was one of the first industries to use public relations services. When intensive muckraking journalism attacked the Rockefeller family, its business, and the “tainted money” the oil industry was making, raising public aversion toward the family, the Rockefellers decided to abandon their traditional policy of silence. In 1907, they hired Joseph I. C. Clarke, a former journalist and arguably the second public relations man in American history, to be the public agent of their company, Standard Oil. Clarke had complete access to the company’s files and executives. When a newspaper attacked Standard Oil, Clarke collected related facts, wrote a story from the company’s perspective, and then requested the same paper to publish his story. The strategy was very successful, and the public image of the Rockefeller family and Standard Oil greatly improved. Clarke also arranged to publish stories on John D. Rockefeller’s philosophy of philanthropy. In 1909, Rockefeller published Random Reminiscences of Men and Events, a memoir that enhanced his public image.

The Ludlow strike brought another public relations man to Standard Oil, Ivy Lee. On April 20, 1914, a fight between striking workers of Colorado Fuel and Iron, a subdivision of Standard Oil, and the national guide sent by the Colorado governor, as well as company guides, took place. Two women and eleven children died in burned tents during the fight, and dozens of other people died afterward or were injured. The incident was finally ended when President Woodrow Wilson sent the army to quell the uprising, but the Rockefeller family inevitably became the target of the public’s protests and repugnance. The Rockefellers hired Lee in May. He restored the Rockefeller family’s image and that of the company by publishing bulletins about the strike and publicizing the entire Rockefeller holdings in the company. He also convinced the Rockefellers to develop a comprehensive plan to address workers’ grievances. They posted placards all over the mines to inform the workers that the company wanted to listen to them and treat them fairly. They met with the workers, danced with their wives, and established an industrial relations counselors’ network to provide advice on labor issues for the Rockefeller companies and other companies, which thereafter became very popular.

Lee believed that “crowds are led by symbols and phrases.” He designed some public relations projects for John D. Rockefeller, including establishing huge foundations and giving coins to people he met (nickels for children and dimes for adults). It is estimated that Rockefeller handed out 30,000 shiny new dimes to people in his late life. Lee never announced Rockefeller’s philanthropic endorsements; instead, he arranged for the recipients of the donations to announce their appreciation. During World War I, Lee worked hard to associate the Rockefellers with patriotism and support for the war effort, planting in newspapers stories about John D. Rockefeller Jr. knitting scarves in his free time for the doughboys overseas. Lee greatly changed Americans’ impressions about the Rockefeller family.

Environmental Risk

In cases of environmental risk, research shows that merely publicizing facts is not enough. Emotional aspects need to be addressed. For example, it is factually true to say that properly trained and equipped workers are safer when working in an asbestos-contained environment than when they are smoking, but it is impossible for the workers’ spouses and the general public to believe that smoking is more dangerous than working with asbestos—at least from sources that have a vested interest in working with asbestos. Meanwhile, attempts to minimize the importance or degree of risk from an accident always fail or backfire. Instead, showing that the company is committed to the implementation and operation of systems designed to control or reduce the risks is likely to make the public more accepting of the information the company is sharing. In any situation, building up public trust is the key to successful public relations efforts.

Management of community relationships, as Frank Friedman notes, is also critical for companies generally viewed as polluters, such as energy companies. He points out that early community opposition to a project with environmental impacts is usually based, not on ideology, but on economic or personal concerns, such as fears that the project may lower real estate or home values. Such opposition needs to be addressed as early as possible, as long as solid data about the project are available. This timely confrontation of the issues will mitigate the intensity of possible litigation, if not reduce it. Friedman also recommends that a company’s public relations professionals and environment managers should coordinate closely to uniformly and clearly enunciate the company’s position to all media, all the time. Some companies limit media access to their public relations departments to help them avoid public relations disasters. A reasonable public relations goal is also important. For companies generally viewed as polluters by the public, no matter how well the companies and their public relations staff work, it is impossible for them to be loved by the public. If those companies can be sensitive to environmental issues and generate a substantial number of jobs, however, they can at least achieve a reputation as socially responsible companies within a polluting industry.

As the overall public relations industry becomes more profit-driven, public relations for the energy industry follows a trend. For instance, since 1995, Shell has been transforming its public relations department. Under a new president, Phil Carroll, the company adopted a new governing model that emphasized the independence of business units. Shell was formed into four independently operated companies, each run by its own chief executive officer. Tax, legal, planning, finance, human resources, and public relations organizations were restructured into four professional firms, providing services to the corporate center, to the four principal companies, and to each other. Being part of one of the four professional firms, Shell’s public relations department was told to add value to other units and compete with outside public relations services to survive in the new Shell. In the traditional model, the value of Shell public relations was measured by the amount of media coverage or column inches garnered to tout the company’s accomplishments. In the new model, the value is measured by how much the public relations service helps the companies and the professional firms to meet their business objectives, usually in terms of financial value. The model worked well even after Carroll retired. Public relations professionals no longer sit idly waiting for unsolicited assignments; they now know their partners’ public relations needs better than their partners themselves.

Many new communications formats and technologies, such as podcasting, wikis, and blogs, have been introduced in energy public relations practices. During the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, for example, BP was reported to use advanced public relations techniques, such as search-engine optimization, to mitigate negative public opinion, which saw the oil spill as a major environmental disaster and was angry with the US government for not doing enough to handle the crisis and regulate BP.

Framing and the Environmental Organizations’ Public Relations

Environmental organizations, usually strong watchdogs of energy companies, are one of the forces that drive energy companies to polish their public relations skills. At the same time, those environmental organizations are also effective in using public relations techniques to achieve their activist goals. Newsletters and Websites, which can reach their members, media outlets, and the general public, are the major public relations tools that they use. Frames are often used in those newsletters and Websites to persuade the audience.

For example, a study of the Sierra Club’s newsletters from spring 2001 to spring 2002 and its Website found that the Sierra Club often framed oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as a threat to one of the America’s greatest natural wilderness treasures—and to traditional American ways of life and wilderness values. The message was that drilling would not serve America’s energy needs and a comprehensive energy plan based on conservation, alternative sources of energy, and improved efficiency standards should be established. Coal-fired power plants were generally framed as causing environmental problems and climate change, from which future generations needed to be protected. The Sierra Club also advanced a message that new technology needs to be developed and used to lessen the impacts of those coal-fired power plants, and that cleaner fossil fuels could be found to replace coal-fired power.

Although environmental organizations also mention some pro-development frames in their Websites and newsletters, they often present two-sided messages. Research shows that environmental organizations are generally effective in influencing national and regional newspapers with pro-environmental frames but have no influence with pro-development frames. Researchers have also found that national and regional newspapers have no influence on each other within presented environmental frames: Both news sources take their pro-environment frames mainly from the environmental organizations’ publications.

Public relations messages from environmental organizations often contain three types of framing: diagnostic framing, identifying the parties that have caused the problems and thus can be blamed; prognostic framing, which proposes a solution to the problems stated in the messages; and motivational framing, which calls for action from supporters. A study by Lynn Zoch and her associates analyzed 16 environmental organizations’ Web pages and found that the most commonly used framing device among those Web pages was general description—that is, the use of sensory language to create an impression. Sensory language may include statistics (numbers), real examples, testimonials, and organization as a solution (clearly proposing a solution on the Website). In this study, it was surprising that only a few visuals (drawings and animations) and no videos were used as framing devices on those Websites. The researchers called upon environmental organizations to use more powerful framing devices to achieve the full potential of their Websites as public relations tools.

In the 2020s, it is important for those in public relations to understand renewable energy sources and support the transition to carbon-free energy. In 2022, 66 percent of the CEOS of Fortune 500 companies had made a net-zero pledge.

Bibliography

Bushell, Sharon, and Stan Jones. The Spill: Personal Stories From the Exxon Valdez Disaster. Kenmore, WA: Epicenter Press, 2009.

Coombs, Timothy, and Sherry Holladay, eds. The Handbook of Crisis Communication. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

Friedman, Frank. Practical Guide to Environmental Management. 9th ed. Washington, DC: Environmental Law Institute, 2003.

Gill, Kristine. "Understanding the Real Hurdles to Jump Before Reaching Net-Zero Emissions Goals." Fortune, 15 June 2022, fortune.com/2023/09/19/no-new-fortune-global-500-company-made-net-zero-commitment/. Accessed 31 July 2024.

"How to Run a Renewable Energy Public Relations (PR) Campaign." Tiger Comm, 2 May 2023, www.tigercomm.us/insights/renewable-energy-public-relations. Accessed 31 July 2024.

Hutchins, H. R. “A New Order for Public Relations: Goodbye Cost Center, Hello Profit Center.” In Handbook of Public Relations, edited by R. L. Heath.Thousands Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001.

Wilson, Albert R. Environmental Risk: Identification and Management. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 1991.

Yao, Qingjiang. “An Evidence of Frame Building: Analyze the Correlations Among the Frames in Sierra Club Newsletters, National Newspapers, and Regional Newspapers.” Public Relations Review 35, no. 1 (2009).

Zoch, Lynn, Erik L. Collins, Hilary Fussell Sisco, and Dustin H. Supa. “Empowering the Activist: Using Framing Devices on Activist Organizations’ Websites.” Public Relations Review 34, no. (2008).