How do you manage crisis communications in your business? Victoria Meyer presents Gerard Braud, the founder and CEO of SituationHub. Gerard explains that the goal in crisis communications is to gather information fast, confirm that information, and turn that information into a statement to your stakeholders. It’s best to prioritize reporting to your employees. Why? Because if you don’t, they may spread rumors and damage the company’s reputation. Proactively answer questions before they are asked. If you want to find out more strategies for managing crisis communications, tune in!
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Managing Crisis Communications: How To Save Your Reputation With Gerard Braud
Thank you for joining me. I appreciate the loyal and the new readers that join us. I enjoy helping to share the story of different chemical executives, companies, and perspectives across the industry. Thank you for reading. If you enjoy this episode, please share it with two friends or colleagues. You can also comment or review either on your favorite podcast player or go over to LinkedIn and leave a message on the show’s page. I am speaking with Crisis Communications Expert Gerard Braud. Gerard has helped leaders on five continents with crisis communications plans, media training, and crisis communications drills. In 2020, he became the Founder of a new crisis communication software platform known as Situation Hub. He has a real passion for helping companies, especially chemical companies, protect their revenue, reputation, and brand.—
Gerard, welcome to the show. It is good to see you. I’m going to start out by asking how did you get into this space? I know you have got a background in the news. How did you switch over to communications and crisis communications? Before the news was childhood, growing up on the fence line of a chemical plant in Luling, Louisiana. I was on the fence line of Monsanto, where my dad worked. When it came time for me to go to college, I worked at Monsanto every summer doing construction to put myself through college. I grew up in the chemical industry, and then I became a reporter. I spent fifteen years as a reporter. A big part of what I covered was the specialty of first politics and politics transitioned into environmental issues at the time I was a reporter. I became designated as an environmental reporter. I was in New Orleans and Baton Rouge in the industrial corridor. For us, environmental issues include wetlands and the environment, Coastal Louisiana, but it also includes that industrial corridor and activism. I spent a lot of time covering Greenpeace and talking to activists’ organizations, and then it blossomed into environmental justice and social issues.
Crisis Communications: Revenue, reputation, and brand are serious multimillion-dollar businesses.
Proactively answer questions before they are asked.They could tell things were going bad with this company. Both of them built facilities to create their own stock and feed themselves. That means that this company that had the fire and explosion was not able to rebuild because their two biggest customers went, “No, we can’t deal with you and wait for you. We don’t trust you. You didn’t show us signs of safety before the incident. The incident proved that you were not safe. We are now taking over and being self-sufficient.” Revenue, reputation, and brand are serious business. It is a multimillion-dollar business. In fact, I think there is a big connection to reputation management, your employee experience, your employee’s view of the company, and your customer experience. Your example there where the customers made decisions left that company because of the reputation and the overall behaviors are real. How do companies get ahead of it? It takes three and a half hours, which probably seems fast, but when you are in the heat of the moment, we all know that it is slow. How do companies get ahead of that? I have got a five-step process that I have been working with companies on for many years now. I will take you real fast through the five-step process, but I’m perpetually perfecting the five-step process to make it go faster. I call it The Five Steps To Effective Crisis Communications. The first thing you do is sit down with your team, bring in a facilitator if you need, and talk about vulnerabilities. A vulnerability assessment looks at everything that could damage your revenue, reputation, and brand. It is the chemical and odor release, the fire and explosion. It is if you get hacked into IT because it is a huge issue or if someone from the company posts something on social media or an executive for the company does something they shouldn’t do. That is captured and publicized on social media. It is all of the arrests of employees, executive misbehavior, bribes, extortion, or sexual harassment. All of these situations fall into two buckets. One is a smoldering crisis and one is a sudden crisis. In the smoldering crisis, you know somebody has been misbehaving for a period of time and has not clamped down on it. The vulnerability assessment is step one. Let’s chart out, map out, and list out everything that could damage your revenue, reputation, and brand that then serves as a roadmap for the next four steps. The second step is to have a good crisis communications plan. In public relations, there are many variations of crisis communications plans. Most that I’m asked to review are not worth the paper they are written on because they tell you things that you should do rather than telling you what you must do, who does it, how fast they do it, and how to achieve it. When I’m writing in a crisis communications plan, I write a document that can be picked up and read in real-time during the incident so that nothing falls through the cracks. Writing a crisis communications plan is different than an incident command or emergency operations plan because you have to have a different one for chlorine and a different one for ZDDP release or whatever it happens to be. In crisis communications, the goal is to gather information fast, confirm that information, turn it into a statement and release it to your stakeholders. Those stakeholders would be the media, if necessary, your employees, or one of the higher priorities there because you need to get information to them fast. Otherwise, they will spread rumors, but then you also have to get into your community and then whatever regulators. Your plan walks you through that. The variable for crisis communications is step three, which is pre-written news releases. There is not a sentence that can’t be written now and used tomorrow. For decades, I have been writing hundreds and thousands of pre-written statements because what I do as a coach and a trainer is I know how the new story is going to be written. I know how the news reporter is going to behave and ask because I was that person.

Crisis Communications: The goal in crisis communications is to gather information fast, confirm that information, and turn that information into a statement to your stakeholders.
Make sure that your word choice conveys the emotion or empathy you need to give.All the chemical and social media incidents, hacking incidents, worker injury, worker fatality, workplace shooting, various types of arrest, plus all of the weather events, hurricanes, the winter storms, and things like this, all of that is built into it. You find out what your event is and go to the tab. If it is a winter storm, you go to the winter storm warning tab for the storm and tell everybody what is happening. If you have an incident after this storm, you go to after storm event. If you have a power outage, you go to power outage. If you have a chemical spill, you go to a chemical spill. If it is an odor release, you go to odor release. If you click on it, it will ask you questions sequentially that are writing a script for you to share on your website. A script that you will read to the media if you do an interview. A script that you are going to email out to all of your customers, community, and employees. It is going to proactively answer the questions that all of those stakeholder audiences want to know. It also has a holding statement. One of the reasons companies don’t release statements is they wait to know everything before saying anything. Wrong, stop doing that. Getting information out is like a buffet. If you go to your typical buffet at a hotel or a casino, there is a soup, a salad, crab claws, or there are entrees later. You have already gone through two cycles of going to get a salad and then going get appetizers. Your third trip is the big thing. You are going to finish it off with dessert. Communicating with your audiences should be the same way. Give us a little more information, the big picture of everything we know, and wrap it up later if we need it. The holding statement can be executed in Situation Hub in 32 seconds to a minute, 30 seconds. If you practice and know what the questions are, you are going to click through and say, “Yes, this is it. That’s it. No to this answer.” It is built on a decision tree to where if I ask you if people are injured, it is going to ask me a bunch more injury questions. If I say no one is injured, it is going to take me down a different decision tree. Even in an event as big as a mass casualty shooting or fire and explosion, a news release can be generated in Situation Hub in ten minutes. You don’t have to think of the phraseology of the sentences. You don’t have to fight over commas. It means that you’re managing your revenue, reputation, brand, and the expectations of the audience at the speed of social media. It has been a goal of mine for decades to find a way to do it. Quite honestly, it is the advent of connectivity and a phone that can get a signal in about every situation that makes it all possible. It is a cloud-based app, but it also works on your phone. You have given us so much here that I want to unpack a little bit, but we are going to start with a couple of things that came to mind as you explained this to me. One thing is I think that people perceive an early prepared response as not being genuine. If I write a generic response, it feels generic. Is that true or how do you get around that? I have never thought it was generic. Every event has different variables. The key is to make sure that your word choice conveys whatever emotion or empathy needs to be conveyed. A huge part of crisis communications is understanding the need to convey empathy. If you have been inconvenienced, people say, “We apologize for the inconvenience.” Lawyers freak out anytime you get close to empathy or apology. There are ways to say what needs to be said without fueling the plaintiff’s attorney.

Crisis Communications: Give your stakeholders a little information until you show the big picture of everything.
You need to understand the concept of being prepared.With your background at Shell, when I was a reporter, Shell in Norco, Louisiana, had this catastrophic catalytic cracker explosion with fatalities and injuries and things like this. One of the things that were brilliant after the event was that the large Exxon Mobil plant in Baton Rouge went to the team at Shell Norco and said, “Walk us through the horror of this, the horror of dealing with the media, and the onslaught of the public so that we can build a plan to be ready if this ever happens to us.” Enough companies don’t do that. That Exxon plant had a major fire and explosion about a year later with two fatalities and a number of injuries. They were so well-prepared to the extent that it happened on Christmas Eve. I had to cover it on Christmas day. I had to leave my family to go cover this tragedy, but they took us into the plant. They took us where it happened and showed us the location. They made it a camera-ready event. The point I would make is the industry always needs to have another vulnerability assessment. In this day and age, you should have a vulnerability meeting once a month, but if it happens to someone else, “Never waste a good crisis.” That was a Churchill quote. Study the other person’s misfortunes, debrief with them as possible, look at that case study, find out what worked what didn’t work, and modify your own plans, behavior, media training, and drills, so that you’re prepared if it ever happens to you. I think collaboration is so key. The industry does collaborate on many things, whether it extends to crisis communications and how to respond. Does it happen often enough is questionable? It is a good segue. In 2022, we have launched the chemical community, an online community specifically for chemical industry professionals to come together and learn from each other. It ties very tightly into this show, and so that is where people can follow up on chemicals, topics, questions and meet speakers and guests. There is also this aspect of what I hear from people regularly is we want to learn from each other. We want to know what other companies are facing, how they have responded to a crisis, how they are approaching it, and be able to do it in an appropriately antitrust manner. Do it under the right guidance, and there is enough that we can do. I encourage people to join The Chemical Community because that is exactly part of what we are building is this opportunity to collaborate and learn from each other.

Crisis Communications: You should have a vulnerability meeting once a month.
Technology helps run your job more smoothly and ensures you tremendous success.I have got one of my friends who is a CEO of one of those companies, and he goes, “I don’t like the idea of subscriptions.” I said, “I know, but you do have LinkedIn Premium and it is about what you would pay for Situation Hub.” He goes, “I don’t like a subscription.” I’m like, “You got Netflix, HBO, and Disney.” We are in a subscription world, whereas I used to go into com companies, and the minimum price was $10,000 for me to write all these news releases and the crisis communications plan. That was the entry price. That had price resistance or that had a resistance of, “We will try that another time.” It is more of a personality gap. Sometimes, it is a conflict internally. One of the major global chemical companies saw Situation Hub and the head of global communications went, “This is sweet. I love what this does because I can get information from remote locations all around the world. I don’t have to wait two weeks until the Wall Street Journal calls me to tell me what happened.” This guy was like, “I am all in on this.” He goes to his senior vice president, who says, “Let’s try to build all of this in-house.” He has no choice. He tried to push back as far as he could. What this means is he is going to spend years trying to build what they could be getting at an enterprise price for $79 a location. His senior VP would not stop to look at what Situation Hub does. They said, “No. Go do something else.” I demo fatigued. I get people constantly trying to sell me a new communications tool or a new text messaging, whatever. I understand it. In a world where your revenue, reputation, brand matter, or public safety matters, your employees are so critical. I said, “I have enough customers already that I’m going to build this tool out of my own pocket.” This is known as a bootstrap company. There is no fancy investor here. There is Gerard, his own money because I know my own clients need it. We have got about 70 companies using it at this point, and they are telling their friends. Back to your question of why some do it and some don’t, it is risk-averse. Human denial is my biggest competitor. It is not another firm in the same space because we all fight that same human denial. As business owners, give me the sliver that lets me enjoy my home, lifestyle, and necessities. It is interesting that I have made it exponentially less expensive and faster. Some get it and some will kick that can down the road. I would imagine that there is a certain element of competition for jobs. For instance, if somebody inside the company is accountable for external and crisis communications. If I can buy a tool that can replace me, then maybe they don’t need me. I imagine there is some human element of that as well.

Crisis Communications: Human denial is the biggest competitor.
The first rule of crisis management is to make the crisis go away.The other thing is, some people go, “There is no place to have a quote from our CEO.” You don’t need a fake quote from your CEO. You are spending 30 minutes as a communicator at the chemical company, trying to write a fake quote and getting it approved by your CEO. You wasted 30 minutes when you could have simply said, “We have a fire. There are no evacuations underway. It has not affected the air, ground, and water.” Each one of those is a single sentence in a single thought. Is there pushback? Sometimes the pushback comes from PR. My belief is I can make your job better and you will get praised for the fast response. Chances are, your boss doesn’t know where the statement came from. Speaking of your boss, who should be in charge? Who is accountable for crisis communications? Is there optimum ownership or accountability structure in this space? There is not a single formula that works for every company because, as we talked about, the lubricant manufacturers and the small chemical distributors as well as the specialty chemical companies, there often is no public relations person. Sometimes, this is owned by the owner of the company or by the CEO. Sometimes it is owned by health, safety, environmental, or whatever combinations of Hs, Ss, and Es. I wish they would all agree to put the letters. Everybody wants them to agree their own way. I’m not sure we will get there. Health Safety Environmental often owns it. If there is a marketing person, that person owns it, and sometimes an incident commander owns it. It varies. I have never found that there was a perfect formula. What is important is to figure out where the decision-makers are, who sits at the table and makes the decisions, how we manage and end the crisis. The first rule of crisis management is to make the crisis go away. That IT, CFO, legal, general manager or Health Safety Environmental incident command, production facilities are all at the table. Someone at that table asked to go out and put out the fire, cap the well, or shut down the release. That person can own everything, but that is not who is going to own the communications.

Important Links:
- LinkedIn – The Chemical Show Podcast
- Situation Hub
- Info@SituationHub.com
- @SituationHub – Twitter
- Gerard Braud – LinkedIn
- PalmerHolland.com
About Gerard Braud

In 2020, he also became the Founder of a new crisis communications software platform, known as SituationHub.com
Gerard’s (Jared’s) path into communications started when he was an award winning television reporter. You may have seen him on CBS, NBC, CNN, HLN, or The Weather Channel.
His passion is helping companies protect their revenue, reputation, and brand by being prepared.