Lessons from the Gulf oil spill: the public watched in disbelief this summer as oil gushed into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. What's also hard to believe is the way BP, and at times the U.S. government, chose to handle the disaster. A marketing consultant suggests ways that your financial services company, when faced with a calamity, can avoid BP's public relations mistakes.

• Author: Kuzmeski, Maribeth

FOR THE PAST SEVERAL MONTHS, our eyes have been glued to news of the Gulf Coast oil spill. And with each barrel of oil that poured into the Gulf, our anxiety and frustration rose exponentially. Much of our ire was aimed squarely at BP. With each day that passes, the oil company is buried deeper in a disaster that will surely be difficult to overcome. And what makes the situation worse is how BP has chosen to connect with the media and the public during these critical days--resorting to misleading information, poor communication, and neglect in order to dodge responsibility for the spill.

The way BP has handled the oil spill should serve as a standard to avoid for any company facing such a disaster in the future. And, although the financial services industry is very different from the oil industry, there are still some core lessons that public relations people for banks can learn from BP's mistakes.

To begin, in a disaster, you expect public opinion to be at its worst immediately after the event. With the BP spill, the backlash has gotten increasingly worse--and continues to get worse because the company hasn't communicated effectively.

And it's not just BP's image that has suffered. Poor communication has also negatively affected the public's view of the government.

People are looking to the president for solutions and until his national address they had been mostly disappointed. Neither BP nor the U.S. government has been able to successfully connect with the public since the spill began. Both could be left with irreparable damage in terms of public opinion.

Obviously, few companies are likely to be involved in disasters of the magnitude of the BP oil spill--few have the capacity to wreak such immense physical and environmental destruction. But bad things can happen to any company--a financial scandal, a faulty product, a high-profile lawsuit. What's essential is how you react and connect with your most important publics.

Here is advice for how your financial services company can mend relationships and immediately start reconnecting with customers and the public following a disaster involving the bank.

Practice full transparency and full disclosure. Until it makes the decision to lay all the cards on the table after a disaster--to be up-front about its decision-making process and solutions--the company in question is stuck behind a roadblock. It is impossible to begin rebuilding relationships with clients and the public in general if you aren't being honest and up-front with them about what has happened. As BP has found out, a lack of transparency attracts closer scrutiny and suspicion.

At different stages of the event it has been revealed that BP wasn't being completely truthful about the spill. At one point, it wasn't allowing the media to get close to the site. And...