Seaworld Ethical Issues

The rise of social media in the modern world has led to magnificent gaffes in the Public Relations landscape. My chosen company – SeaWorld Parks & Entertainment, more commonly known as SeaWorld, and campaign – #AskSeaWorld cited in my main article (Coffee, P., 2015) made me consider how a company’s PR efforts can cause further problems for the company. SeaWorld’s reputation and financial health had been taking a series of hits since the documentary Blackfish, which highlighted their mistreatment of orca whales in captivity, and PETA’s campaign against them in late 2014. (Vigil, J., 2014) The aforementioned events caused a strong backlash in the public sphere, leading to a reduction in attendance, poor press, and a significant social media outcry.

After the release of Blackfish in various media outlets, there was no shortage of activity from SeaWorld, including posts on their Twitter, Facebook and Instagram feeds, with information regarding their killer whales and the animals under their care. (Osegi, A., 2014) The problem that manifested from their active and aware public stakeholders can be identified as a public-initiated problem (PPR) (Kim & Ni, 2013). At that point of time, the main stakeholders involved in SeaWorld’s PR problem were firstly their visitors, their shareholders, as well as their detractors, which included PETA and other organizations for animal rights. (Vigil, J., 2014) Besides these parties, the general public’s opinions could also be swayed through various forms of communication from both proponents and detractors of SeaWorld. It is likely that SeaWorld was attempting to reduce the level of hostility in public perception through providing information on their feeds. However, according to Brandwatch, it has been shown that a large proportion (62%) of tweets mentioning SeaWorld had negative sentiment, out of a number of 1.2 million in July 2015. (Valinsky, J., 2015). Thus, we can infer that most of public mention falls within the range of active to aware public, and SeaWorld’s problem could have been further compounded due to cognitive dissonance (Festinger, L., 1957), causing active and aware publics to search for their own sources of

Firstly, the use of Twitter as the main medium of communication in this situation has strong disadvantages due to its 140 character limit and the ability of activists to hijack the platform. While retaining the idea of #AskSeaWorld, the company could have simply elected to collate questions from the public and post a select few on their social media accounts or website, giving the company the power to sieve out offensive material. While this reduces the perceived transparency of the campaign, an environmental scanning of Twitter would have revealed a preexisting negative sentiment towards SeaWorld, and would have identified hashtag hijacking as a potential threat. Secondly, given the situation, it would have been more prudent for SeaWorld’s communications team to directly address the film Blackfish instead of leaving out this important factor in their campaigns. A direct approach, along with a consistent stand and transparency in addressing issues would have been more applicable to the situation that SeaWorld was facing, since transparent communications builds trust in a brand. (Rawlins, B., 2009) Thus, in their communications, they could have added a segment to discuss the frequently asked questions about Blackfish, or even better, done a commentary about the film and posted it in their social