Listen to this Episode on Crisis Communication with Gerard Braud of SituationHub:
The speed of communication during a crisis can determine whether a company maintains control of its story or loses it to speculation and misinformation. Gerard Braud, crisis communications expert, joins host Victoria Meyer to share real-world insights from decades of experience in both journalism and the chemical industry, emphasizing the critical need for rapid, clear, and well-prepared communication when incidents occur. Together, they explore how chemical companies can build effective crisis communication strategies, prepare holding statements, tackle challenges like incomplete information and confidentiality, and leverage tools such as SituationHub to streamline the process.
With practical examples and straightforward advice, Gerard and Victoria discuss why preparation on a “clear, sunny day” is essential to protect revenue, reputation, and brand in the face of crisis—highlighting what every chemical industry leader should know before the next incident hits the news.
Learn more about these topics this week:
- Inside the Mind of a Crisis Expert: Gerard Braud’s career from his early days as a TV journalist to a crisis communications advisor for the industry.
- Redefining Crisis Response: why traditional, slow corporate communication puts companies at risk
- Mistakes Companies Make: what happens when companies don’t prepare
- The New Rules of Media Engagement
- Leadership on the Worst Day
Other Links:
Managing Crisis Communications: How To Save Your Reputation With Gerard Braud
Killer Quote: “If you’re not getting a statement out in under fifteen minutes, you’re doing it all wrong. Be prepared on a clear, sunny day so you’re your best on your worst day.” — Gerard Braud
Watch Victoria and Gerard Talk about Crisis Management on Youtube Here:
How Crisis Communications Strategies Enable Fast Response with Gerard Braud
Welcome back to The Chemical Show, where chemicals means business. So today, I get have the opportunity to speak with Gerard Braud, who is a crisis communications expert. If you’ve been in the chemical industry for a while and really almost any industry, you know that there’s a variety of incidents that have been in the news. Often, the company response could be better. I like to tell people, you either control the narrative and control the story or somebody is gonna make it up for you. And in the case of the chemical industry in particular, as you guys know within my target audience here, knowing that story and telling our story is really critical. So I am excited to have Gerard Braud back on The Chemical Show here to talk about crisis communications. He was first on The Chemical Show, boy, back in our early days.
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I’m gonna link to that episode because I’m sure there is still something for you to learn from that. And we’re gonna kinda have a refresh conversation talking about how chemical companies and leaders can be ready to respond. So, Gerard, welcome to The Chemical Show.
Hey. It’s good to be back.
Absolutely. So let’s just start with a little bit about you. What is your origin story? How did you get interested in this field of crisis communications?
My first career was actually as a TV journalist. I did a little newspaper, but mostly fifteen years in TV. The last ten of those, I was covering mainly environmental issues. I was working first, in Baton Rouge, then in New Orleans. So I had this massive industrial corridor between Baton Rouge and the mouth of the Mississippi River. So I was covering environmental issues, pollution issues and, of course, I was also the first one on the scene every time there was a fire or explosion.
I had to deal with community activists. I had to deal with all of the various protests that would happen. Greenpeace did a massive campaign down the Mississippi River when I was a reporter. And as I did my news reports every day, I would see people say things to me that they should never say to anyone, things they wouldn’t say to their competitors they would say to me holding a microphone with a TV camera recording them and putting them on the air. And I didn’t do it to be mean or anything. I just did it because that was my job. I’m telling the story.
I ask a question. They answer it poorly. So I started taking notes about how people did interviews so poorly, and I started building a curriculum for media training. And when I left television, I was doing a lot of media training. As I would do the media training, all of my chemical clients needed it to be crisis communications media training. They weren’t cutting ribbons or doing some happy pappy PR news. They needed crisis communications. And as I started doing that, I started inventing new ways to help them to be better.
So many people in media training teach a spokesperson how to have three key messages. Your first key message is, safety is our top priority. And our second key message, our employees are our greatest asset. And our third key message is, we give to the United Way. Then there’s fire and explosion and they stand in front of a burning chemical plant and say, “Safety is our top priority.” And I’m sitting there going clearly not sparky because I see flames over your head. And, well, employees are our our greatest asset. Well, clearly not the ones who are dead today.
It was just comical how badly interviews went. So I left TV, started doing media training that went into writing crisis communications plans. And then I started building a whole bunch of Word documents that were pre-written news releases so that we could get to people faster. In crisis communications, it’s really about what you do on a clear sunny day to prepare for your worst day. That means not just all the safety stuff that you do, it has to be the communications with your employees, with the media, with your community. And what has happened now, we’re coming up on the twentieth anniversary of Facebook being launched and companies still don’t move at the speed of social media. So my goal has been to build systems and to do training for the chemical industry so that they’re able to get a statement out in three to five minutes instead of three to five hours.
Wow.
It just gets me so mad every time there’s a big fire and explosion somewhere, to watch three to five hours go by before a statement comes out. So that’s my origin story to where I am today as the evangelist to prepare and to get statements out fast.
Absolutely, and that obviously led you to launching SituationHub.
Yeah. SituationHub is a software company. I’d still consider it in its startup phase, but I’m now in my fifth year. We launched during COVID, and what SituationHub does is I always see certain problems, and I’ll go through them real fast, and I wanted to fix these problems. So the crisis happens and there’s a lack of information. Somebody maybe will call into command center with a radio, but too many organizations still rely on a calling tree. And if you’ve ever been on a calling tree, you repeat yourself 10 times to 10 people and that slows the flow of information.
Additionally, the communications team, if there is one, and the big companies have communications teams, the small ones have to have somebody else do it, but the information to the communications team doesn’t get to them in time. Then when it does get to them, they have to write a news release. After they spend 30 to 45 minutes writing the news release, they take it into a bunch of nonwriters, accountants, engineers, and they say, what do you think? And those people tear it apart. They fight over commas. They send it back for a second draft. Second draft comes. They go through a little bit more revision. The third draft goes out and three and a half hours pass.
What I invented with SituationHub is log into a software system. Pick what your event is. If it’s a fire, choose fire. If it’s a spill, choose spill. If it’s a truck accident, choose truck accident. Workplace injury, choose workplace injury. It feeds you questions. It’s all about the brilliant prompts that we wrote for it.
As you answer the questions, it is simultaneously writing the news release. Once you finish answering the questions, there’s a little button that says alert team, and that pushes a blast out to a dozen of your critical crisis communications team members and brings them all to a virtual situation room. So now everybody in seconds has situational awareness. So from the flashpoint until you answer the questions is three to five minutes depending on how critical your event is and the number of fatalities. Hit that button that says alert team. Everyone has instant access. You read for correctness. Nothing is written in prose.
Forget what your English teacher taught you. That’s not what SituationHub is. SituationHub is writing like a journalist, and it’s just facts. No nuance, no opinion, no putting lipstick on the pig as I like to say. It covers who, what, when, where, why and how without speculation. It provides proper empathy and if it’s all true, one button puts it on the internet. So now you can share that statement with the media, with your employees, with your community and other stakeholders. So that has been my passion project and I actually invented it in my head twenty years ago, but I didn’t build it initially because connectivity wasn’t good enough.
Now with cell phones and connectivity, there’s almost no place you can go where you’re not getting some sort of a signal. So SituationHub is ideal on a nice computer screen, but it works well on your phone, works well anywhere. And instead of carrying one of my old crisis communications plans here. That was a hundred prewritten news releases. That’s a ream and a half of paper. So instead of carrying all of that around, I can give you a 26 page crisis communications plan and instructions on how to use SituationHub and anybody anywhere in the world can be doing crisis communications at the speed of social media. That first statement will be out in five minutes or less if you practice and do it right, and then you can have a second statement with more details within one hour.
So that’s my passion.
Wow. That’s really cool. I think just the journey of where you’ve been since even since we talked the first time is pretty awesome. I’m gonna dial us back a little bit. So you focus on helping companies with crisis communications. What actually is a crisis or crisis communication situation? When does it apply?
So the best way to define it is, is it something that will damage the company’s revenue, reputation, and brand? Revenue first, then reputation and brand. So I’m in the public relations field, and so many people in public relations preach reputation management. That’s why managers see PR as a soft skill. You have to connect the dots and realize that if your reputation is damaged, it’s gonna damage your revenue. At this point in time, I’ll take a risk at looking at a small controversy that’s in the news every day. So, this is 2025 and Donald Trump is president of The United States at this moment in time and Elon Musk is helping him. And as Elon Musk does things within government, he’s hurting his brand. He’s doing reputation damage.
But as he does reputation damage because of his political views, he’s doing revenue damage. His stock is down 50%. That’s a crisis. That’s a corporate crisis. For a chemical person, it could be the fire. It could be the spill. It could be an an accident, a workplace injury, or fatality, any of those day to day things that could happen, but it can also be every sort of natural disaster. It can be weather events, hurricanes, freezes.
We constantly see along the Gulf Coast and the Atlantic Coast that hurricanes come in and damaged facilities causing releases. All of that stuff can be a crisis. You also have, what I would call, your executive white collar type crisis, bribes, embezzlement, sexual harassment, but you can also have cyber events. If you get a cyber attack, that’s crisis. If you have social media blow up in your face, sometimes you post something you think is pleasant on social media and it creates a social media backlash. So all of these things can be considered a crisis. If one of my chemical companies using SituationHub logs in, there are more than 80 different templates that they can choose from. And if you go to situationhub.com and go to the chemical page, at the very bottom, you’ll see little tabs with all of the very different things that could be a crisis.
That’s just a perfect way to do a hit list for yourself and see, jeez, how many of these things could happen to me? How do we communicate quickly for them?
So I think that’s super helpful, and you’ve gone through some of the scenarios. So, I’m gonna jump to two of the things that I personally see happening that maybe hamper communications. In fact, it’s crisis communications. It’s non crisis communications. It’s just communications of all varieties
Across companies, chemical companies and other companies is, first of all, incomplete information. And this belief or desire that if I just wait a little bit longer, I have more information, and it’s going to be better. Then the second piece is this view of, I can’t communicate because I need to protect someone, someone is someone or a company or somebody’s confidentiality and privacy. How do you respond to that?
First of all, you don’t need to know everything to say something. Saying something has happened and we don’t know all the details, but when we know the details, we’ll get them to you is a good statement. In public relations, during a crisis, you should put out something that’s called a holding statement. In SituationHub, it’s listed as a first critical statement. It’s the first template that shows up in the list of 80 templates, and it generates something that’s going to be about 10 to 15 sentences long that says what the event is, what time did it happen, where did it happen. It won’t speculate on the cause. There’ll be a specific sentence that says members of the team are still gathering information. When we know more, we’ll pass it on to you.
It’ll cover whether anybody’s dead, whether anybody’s injured, whether anybody’s missing. If necessary, it’ll have an effigy statement. It’ll admonish the media not to believe everything you see on social media. It’ll promise to do an update and it promises to give more information. And when this statement goes out, 15 sentences are going to be approximately ninety seconds in reading time. This is something, you know, if you’re an old TV guy. 15 sentences equals ninety seconds. So with ninety seconds of information given to the media, that gives them ninety seconds of facts to say on the air rather than speculating.
When I used to show up at chemical plants and there was no spokesperson, we’d start doing live shots immediately. I lived next to a chemical plant when I grew up. My dad works at the chemical plant. I put myself through college at the chemical plant. I can speculate a little better than most of the other reporters, but I was still forced to speculate until someone gave me facts. By giving a holding statement, a first critical statement, you end the drama of the speculation and they’ll repeat it over and over again because you gave them that. And then with SituationHub, you can go back into the app, you create a second statement that’s going to have more details. And so you don’t have to know everything, but by the time you start creating that second statement, let’s say twenty, thirty minutes has passed, you know a lot more.
Now regarding privacy issues, in my app, it is built to where it covers fatality, injuries, missing people, and it’s built for mass casualty. You can kill more than 20. You can injure more than 20. You can have more than 20 missing in this news release, but it always gives you the option to either give their name or not give their name, to give their age or not give their age, to say what their injuries are or not say what their injuries are, to say what hospital they’re going to. So you’re able to not violate HIPAA, and I think the world became more sensitive to HIPAA during COVID when the internal lawyer saw and said, you can’t say Bob has COVID. That’s a violation of HIPAA. You can only say Bob’s not at work today. So the privacy issues are all addressed in my software platform, certainly.
If there are still executives who think that’s a problem, they need to address it on a clear sunny day and not babble it out in the crisis command center on the day of the crisis. It’s so much about what you do before the event happens. You were asking what crisis communications is. Crisis communications comes in two forms. If an organization does something bad and they try to cover it up and then the story gets uncovered by a whistleblower or by an investigative reporter, then you have to try to put what I call lipstick on the pig. It’s an ugly pig. Putting lipstick on it doesn’t make it any prettier, and you have to do so much more work to repair the revenue, reputation and brand on the back end. My specialty, even though I do some of that stuff, in fact, I’ve got three clients right now, it’s just like this year has been crazy with people wanting me to fix the broken.
What I really specialize in is keeping it from ever breaking. Don’t let the crisis happen. And if the crisis does happen, guess what? We’ve got 80 plus news releases ready to communicate in three to five minutes so that you get ahead of the story. One other thing that’s happening is when companies use these scripts, traditionally, a reporter would show up. I know I always did that. If nobody’s talking to me, I go knock on the trailer near a chemical plant, and I interview whoever comes out. So Bubba comes out in his t shirt and his overalls, and I ask what happens.
And he says, well, I saw the plant, it blowed up real good. That actually happened to me. I actually have a sound bite of a guy saying it blowed up real good. I use it in a lot of my training classes. But then I’m talking to somebody who doesn’t have the facts. Now Bubba today is on social media. I don’t even have to go knock on the door.
And with SituationHub, what I’m doing now is I’m producing a script, and I’m training people to read scripts in media training class. When they read those scripts, we’re getting 50 to 75% of what our spokespeople say ending up word for word in the final news story. They’re quoting our spokespeople four and five times on camera. Therefore, they run out of time, and they don’t have time to go find Bubba. And if a TV story is ninety seconds long and I’ve produced a ninety second script in SituationHub, I just wrote the reporters story. And you and I were talking, previously about how reporters today are often very young. The veterans, people like me, aren’t in the business anymore.
They weren’t paying us enough money to stay in the business, and we went elsewhere. But when these young reporters come in, they have no background on chemicals. They just think all chemicals are bad. They don’t realize how many chemicals were in the microphone they’re holding, cell phone they’re holding, all of the equipment they use, their clothes, their automobile. People are pretty ignorant when it comes to what are chemicals and what are their good uses. They immediately go to the fear of what chemicals are. So many reporters doing stories in the chemical industry were ill informed. You and I were also discussing how some of them are just flat lazy, and they want you to do your homework for them.
Well, guess what, kids? I did your homework. I wrote the term paper. It’s called a news release. Here it is. And now they’re using 50 to 75% of everything we give them word for word when we do it. So in the big picture, that brings all of those pieces together.
Yeah. It’s pretty amazing. And as you noted, we were talking about this. I’ve been in a couple of articles recently and I’m quite liberally quoted. But again, if you give somebody good, coherent, solid information, they’re gonna use it, then they don’t have to create it. Because ideally, a reporter should not be a creative writer. They should be a reporter. In times of crisis and even non-crisis, we want accuracy in our reporting.
Absolutely.
Gerard, the other thing I see happening that maybe just inhibits the whole time aspect of it, and certainly, I could see where this is true with smaller companies, is not knowing who’s on first. Who gets to approve the press release, approve the statement, having that person ready to speak. Do you see that happening a lot, or has that been sorted out?
No. It’s never sorted out because most people don’t plan. They wing it. And when you wing it, you crash and burn. So a crisis communications plan is something that you write on a clear sunny day that outlines everything that’s gonna happen from flashpoint to end of the news cycle. Now sometimes that news cycle is three or four hours. Sometimes it’s twelve hours. Sometimes it’s twenty-four.
Sometimes it’s days and it’s weeks depending on what it is. And there is a cadence that you have to follow, but you also have to follow who’s gonna gather the information about the crisis, who’s gonna share it, how do you bring the team together, what’s the approval process, who are your spokespeople. Because in the early moments of a crisis, I can’t send a subject matter expert out. I need to send a PR personnel to read the first statement because my main managers need to be managing the incident, not managing the media. And I always said that about Tony Hayward and the BP crisis. Tony Hayward should have been managing the business and the crisis of the oil spill in the Gulf Of Mexico instead of being on camera every day trying to manage the media where he royally screwed up, lost his job, damaged the revenue, reputation, and brand even more. So picking spokespeople means you need to have bench strength. You need to know when to send out a public relations spokesperson, when to send out someone from operations, subject matter expert.
Many companies think only the CEO should speak and that we speak with one voice and it’s my deep voice because I’m the CEO and I’m old. And, no, that’s not true because if that person messes up, who cleans up their mistake? A long time ago I realized that when the CEO comes out for something that is not a super high level crisis, then it makes the crisis appear bigger. But also if there is empathy to be conveyed, that’s when you bring out the big cheese, the CEO. Prior to that, a subject matter expert works. So you’ve got to have multiple people that you can turn to that have all been trained. This doesn’t come easy. Talking to the media is like no other interview you will ever do, and the questions are what kill people. You can come out and make a statement, but it’s your questions where you say one wrong word and everything goes bad.
And so what I built into SituationHub was sentences that are bulletproof and sentences in a statement that answer questions before they get asked. For example, a news release might say we can confirm there is one fatality. Okay. If you say that, you will be asked who is it, or you’re given their name, or their employee contractor, or visitor, what was their age. But if my news release in SituationHub says we can confirm there is one fatality, however, we’re not able to release any additional information until the next of kin have been notified, that extra second half of the sentence takes away three questions.
Yeah. As a non-reporter, I was gonna say a nonmedia person and yet I consider myself a media person at this point with my podcast.
Hey, if there’s a camera and a mic, right?
Yeah. But as a non-reporter, just a layperson when it comes to many of the news releases, the articles, and stuff, I gotta be honest. When they say company spokesperson blah blah blah said….. Oh, heck. They said nothing. Let’s move along. So I’m actually personally often quite disappointed.
Me too.
In the immediate moment, you know what? Absolutely. There was an incident. We are addressing it. We can confirm that there was an incident. That immediate confirmation, great. But when three hours or six hours or twenty-four hours has gone on and it’s still, well, company spokesperson, I’m disappointed. It’s a reputation issue at that point for me.
It’s a public relations issue. Right? It happens in PR school in college where they teach you the old method of writing the news release that always calls for a quote from a high level executive. That’s complete BS. You don’t have to track him down. And everybody writes these made up quotes, and then it kills more time getting the guy to say, can we say that you said this? Then he’s gonna rewrite what they said he said that he now wants to say differently.
When I first rolled out SituationHub, that was actually one of the things I got from PR people was, well, there’s no quote in here. Every sentence is quotable. Now that we’re seeing companies use SituationHub that have been in a crisis and they’re pulling four and five sound bites, not only are they pulling four and five sound bites that the person read from the script, they’re pulling the same sound bites from TV station to TV station to TV station. And that was always because I know there are certain catnip sort of phrases that if I put it in the statement, I promise the reporter will use it. Because as a reporter, I was trained to interview people, look for great quotes. Once I have a quote, I have to build a series of sentences to get me to that quote, and then I have to build a series of sentences to transition out of that quote. So what I’m doing in my scripts is all of the transitions are built in. All of the quotes are built in.
You don’t have to hit quotation marks, a comma in Bob Smith’s name for it to be quoted. They’re going to quote a company spokesperson said or the company said just very generically. The company said they would conduct an investigation to find out what happened, how it happened, and how we keep it from happening again. That gets quoted every time. Another statement that gets quoted every time is we’d like to thank the responders and members of the community. All of my thank you statements gets quoted every time. And there are so many catnip nuggets that I’ve built in.
It eliminates what you see, and I’m glad you’ve seen this. I’m glad you called this out. It is stupid. It is insane. When time is of the essence and revenue, reputation, and brand are on the line. Why would you waste time getting BS that no one believes anyway? And the other thing I want you to notice is as all of us go forward, everybody listening to this show and watching this program, take a shot every morning when you hear someone say safety is our top priority. I am so tired of the phrase “safety is our top priority” or “we’re committed to safety.” It’s not true because if you were, you wouldn’t be having the problem today.
You wouldn’t be on the CBS Evening News and the NBC Nightly News and all the other networks.
I’m with you on that. I worked for Shell for a very long time, a big part of my career at a great company, but it got to be where well, let’s start with safety. Let’s start with our results. When it is a platitude, it becomes a bit meaningless. It is important. We want everyone to go home safely from work every day.
Be present safely. Go home safely. Absolutely. No doubt about it. But it’s used in such a platitude kind of a way that it loses its power.
So, Gerard, this has been really good. If you were gonna leave people with one message for crisis communications, what would it be?
We live in the age of social media. If you’re not getting a statement out in under fifteen minutes, you’re doing it all wrong. I would say that if you’re not doing what needs to be done on a clear sunny day to be your best on your worst day, then you are missing the boat. Chemicals can be handled safely every day. They’re used by consumers every day. But on the day when something goes wrong, no matter what your safety culture is, it’s that thing that goes wrong that’s often beyond your control that creates a crisis that damages your revenue, reputation, and brand, and I wanna make sure that doesn’t happen for you. So it’s all about preparation and having the right tools in place.
That’s great. Gerard, thank you so much for joining me today on The Chemical Show.
Good seeing you.
Absolutely. And thanks everyone else for joining us. Keep listening. Keep following. Keep sharing, and we will talk with you again soon.
About Gerard Braud:
Gerard Braud
Gerard Braud is a veteran crisis communications expert and former journalist with more than 40 years of experience. Founder of Braud Communications, he has trained and advised organizations worldwide, including the IRS, on media and crisis response. His work has appeared on NBC, CNN, and BBC. Gerard is also the creator of SituationHub, a crisis communication software. He holds a journalism degree from Louisiana Tech and lives in Louisiana with his wife Cindy.