Managing Crisis Communications: How To Save Your Reputation With Gerard Braud

by | Feb 22, 2022 | Podcast | 0 comments

TCSP 37 | Crisis Communications
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.

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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.
TCSP 37 | Crisis Communications

Crisis Communications: Revenue, reputation, and brand are serious multimillion-dollar businesses.

  As a reporter, I watched a couple of things. Companies didn’t know how to deal with activists. When Greenpeace came, Greenpeace made them look like fools, but I also observed that if there was a fire and explosion. When I showed up at the scene of that fire and explosion, there was never anyone from the company there to greet me or share information with me and 2, 3, and 4 hours would go by with me doing live news coverage and no official information. That brings me to where I am now. I kept looking every day going, “Somebody needs to tell these people, ‘I thought I would try this.’” I became one of those guys that became a coach to spokespeople in the chemical industry saying, “This is what the media and public expect of you. I have talked to them. I know what their needs are. Let’s meet their needs.” I think we have all seen this in a world of social media where everybody is a reporter because they have a video camera on their phone with them at all times. It is super challenging to stay ahead of it. The eyewitnesses now tell every event you are over there in the Houston area and have had an enormous number of fires, explosions, and chemical releases over the past few years. I don’t know what is going on in the industry but what I can do is look at the trend of how every one of these unfolds in the news and the community. This is where my passion lies in getting information out that is factual, fast, and without the fluff. The pain problem and predicament companies face are that 3 hours 30 minutes to a 4-hour window it takes from the flashpoint of the incident or the situation to gather information about it. Draft a statement, get approval for this statement, but go through numerous rewrites, so they can go through a legal review before a statement goes out. I always clock. It was 3 hours and 38 minutes before the statement came out. That was unacceptable back when I was a reporter, but it is especially unacceptable in the day of social media. Everybody has got one of these phones and the ability to take pictures and put it on Twitter. Twitter and Facebook Live are instant. It is time for corporations, especially our friends in the chemical industry, to say, “We need to come of age and recognize that if we are going to protect our revenue, reputation, and brand. Part of doing that is communication when a situation goes bad fast. That is the bottom line. If you try to expand your plant and the community hates you because of your last fire and explosion, you are never getting that plant and expansion. All that revenue is going down the drain. It is not going to materialize. If it is an unsafe company, your customers are going to leave you. It is interesting because I have at least two of my major chemical clients. One of them is in the Houston area and New Jersey, but both lost feedstock that they were getting from a Houston company.
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.
TCSP 37 | Crisis Communications

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.

  Although the phraseology may differ, I know every question they are going to ask, and people always go, “You never did all the questions.” The questions are who, what, when, where, why, and how. The how and the why lead into speculation, which causes lawyers to go nuts, saying, “We can’t fuel plaintiff’s attorneys.” The secret to a pre-written statement is to have a sentence that says, “Members of our team are still investigating. When we know more, we will share it with you. It would be inappropriate for us to speculate on the cause. When we know more, we will conduct an investigation telling you more.” The pre-written statements I have been creating for decades means the language can be pre-approved by everyone on the crisis management team, public relations, all of the executives, and the lawyers so that we go from hours of approval to minutes. I converted that into the software platform that you mentioned. Once you have the statements written, step four of Effective Crisis Communications is to train your spokespeople. I need a well-trained spokesperson. If you follow my methodology, have a pre-written statement. That statement becomes a script. Media training, media interviews, and news conferences become exponentially easier because you rely on a script. The script I write has a secret sauce, which is it answers every question you will get asked. It proactively answers questions before they get asked. You don’t have to fumble for words when a barrage of questions comes in. When my clients finish a news conference, there are almost no questions because they have been proactively answered. The only thing they are going to get asked is more speculative questions about the how and the why. If I can media train them to rely on their deflective statements of, “It would be inappropriate for us to comment on that. We will wait for an investigation to tell us what happened, how it happened, and how we keep it from happening again.” I train them to do that rather than traditional media train with all of this mind mapping of word phrases and stuff like that. The fifth part of the secret recipe to effective crisis communications is when you do drills and make sure you are doing drills and the entire process of writing, approving a news release, and conducting a news conference is done in that drill so that you are getting real-life experience. Don’t sit at a table and go, “Bob would go get the fire truck. John would come on in there with the spray, and Mike would be putting on his hazmat suit. We would both put on the hazmat suits and go in there with the pipe wrench.” Don’t talk it out. Act it out, meaning act out at least the news conference. Those are the five steps. What I have been able to do with Situation Hub is it gnaws at me if you can’t tell how they are ready when people are slow. I have been trying for decades to make it move faster and more successfully to get people to move within one hour or less of the onset of the crisis. That is in every one of my plans. With social media, one hour is 59 minutes too long. What I did was I had the stream for software. I started trying to find people to write it and found a team of coders to start doing the smart behind-the-scenes stuff because I am not a tech person when it comes to writing computer code, but I showed them what I wanted to do. Over a couple of years, we built this product and I launched it. The company in Houston was the first one to use it. They were the first ones to sign on with it. They were an existing customer, but what I’m able to do is the vulnerability assessment. It is already done. I have already figured out most of what is going to go wrong with you. We can still have that discussion and spend some time on it. In Situation Hub, the way it works as you log into the software, and it has got a bunch of pull-down tabs of all the situations that could go wrong. If you are a chemical company, your subscription is going to log you in right now, and I think there were about 70 to 75 different scenarios.
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.
TCSP 37 | Crisis Communications

Crisis Communications: Give your stakeholders a little information until you show the big picture of everything.

  The short declarative sentences tell us who, what, when, where, why, and how. It is not insincere to tell the audience what happened. What is insincere and unacceptable is to stay nothing because you are trying to write these pros. The time for writing pros is long gone, yet everybody still wants to write some beautiful sentences. What I have done is in every Situation Hub event template, the first sentence is an empathetic statement that adds context. I call it a preamble, and I have been using it as part of my media training now for many years, but it adds context to the event. If we think of our friends in the industry, most of them have said, “Safety is our top priority.” As a reporter, I would be standing there, and there is a ball of fire and black smoke coming from over Sparky’s shoulder, “They are clearly not Sparky because I see a fireball. Safety wasn’t your top priority.” That sentence is thought out. It would say, “At XYZ chemical, one of our goals is always to be protective of human health, the environment and its transitions.” However, there are times when things go wrong. Now it is empathy. Sadly, this is one of those days. I have the option. If somebody is dead, I can add by clicking a button a sentence that says, “Our hearts are heavy with the news. We have to share with you.” This is what we can confirm. I go through the who, what, when, where, why, and how. It is not generic to the extent that it is vanilla. It still has empathy and conveys emotion. All of this has been thought out because the question you asked me is the question I have been asked by everybody for many years. How do we make a statement that has its own life? Some people will go, “What if our company says this and another company says the same thing?” Nobody is going to know. Nobody is comparing it. What they are comparing is what I’m comparing, which is you said nothing, and that was unacceptable, or you waited three hours. That is unacceptable. I have been in so many war rooms and crisis centers over the decades. I know everything that is going to happen, so I can write the words for it. That is helpful. The comment you made about safety is our number one responsibility as they are standing in front of an incident of some variety. There is a nuance to it. It reminded me of a few years ago when I was working for Shell, leading the safety day event for Shell Chemicals in Houston. It is a designated day that Shell picks every year. All around the globe, they do a safety day event that covers various things. That very day there had been a major incident in the Netherlands. I do remember saying, “We are here. Unfortunately, this incident occurred this morning in the Netherlands. Fortunately, they appeared to be no fatalities. We don’t want that to happen again, and that is why we are here now.” You have to acknowledge that while you may be focusing on safety as one of your critical priorities, and it is across the industry, I believe that. There are risks that occur and you can’t make it completely risk-free, and things happen. You have to acknowledge that. To your point about safety day, as a reporter, I used to cover those. I was at one plant and my final question was, “Anything else you want to add?” The guy goes, “You didn’t ask me about them. Two guys got their toes crushed by that tank car, but I want to say safety is our top priority.” I’m going like, “What?” The entire story changed, but I know their PR people must have been thinking, “This went from safety day to unsafety day.”
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.
TCSP 37 | Crisis Communications

Crisis Communications: You should have a vulnerability meeting once a month.

  It is one of the things that I love when you do that type of thing because sometimes, people can ask a colleague a question that they would get shut down in their own organization. Part of what the industry needs to find is who will be the leader who will own this. A lot of people have too many things on their plates and kick the can down the road. It is not as though you can look at your killer calendar and go, “Let me pull up my phone here. I can do the fire and explosion on Saturday because most of us are off Saturday. We got a wedding Saturday night. We can’t do the fire and explosion.” You don’t schedule a crisis. Why wait? I’m an Eagle Scout and what I found is Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts in the industry are my favorite people because they understand the concept of being prepared. The number of executives that I have dealt with over the decades who were in denial about the need to prepare or will kick that can down the road drives me insane. Why do you think that is? I see this with companies. I won’t say particularly with smaller companies, and I know that you work closely with NACD, the National Association of Chemical Distributors and ILMA, which is lubricant manufacturers, encompass a lot of small companies. My observation, and it is not with small companies, it is also at times with big companies that people 1) Don’t think it is going to happen to them. 2) They don’t want to spend the money now. Why spend the money for something that may never come true or may not take place for another 3 or 5 years? Is that what you see? Is that why people are not prepared? That is part of it yet, they are still going to buy an insurance policy in case the place blows up and it needs to be repaired. They are going to spend a boatload on insurance, but they won’t spend $199 a month or a Situation Hub subscription. Back to smaller companies versus larger companies, I would say that some get it and some don’t. Some have a be prepared mindset, and others are going to wing it, and they’re going to take their chances. They are different risk-averse personality types. What I love about dealing with the National Association of Chemical Distributors and ILMA is that in a lot of these smaller companies, I’m able to deal straight with the CEO, the owner, or the fourth-generation owner of the company. Those folks often get it, but some of them are old-fashioned, and I don’t want to spend that money.
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.
TCSP 37 | Crisis Communications

Crisis Communications: Human denial is the biggest competitor.

  There are two human elements of that. The first one is it won’t replace you because you have dozens, if not hundreds, of things to do in addition to writing the statement. Writing of the statement should not define what your job is. Your job is to communicate to multiple audiences, and getting those audiences and managing all the tools you have to do is a huge piece. I’m able to take that one task of writing off of their plate so they can be better at the other 99 things they need to do. I will do one for you, and you will do the other 99 tasks. Your boss is not going to fire you because my app automatically collects information, shares the information, and writes a news release. It also creates an opportunity. I used to work for a global mining company. They operated a copper, gold, and silver mine over in Asia. Incidents would happen there that were relatively grand in scale that we should have been communicating about. We didn’t find out for two weeks until the Wall Street Journal called us, “We didn’t hear about this.” In Situation Hub, you log in and answer the questions. There is a button that says, “Alert Team.” You hit that button and everybody who needs to know gets an instant alert on their phone and in email. You click that and it brings you into a virtual situation room where everyone can read the facts and review them. If it is your job to do all of this, I have taken away the calling tree. You are on the phone with Indonesia, Jakarta, Taiwan, or wherever you happen to be. I have taken away trying to get the information from the remote location because we have trained the person at the remote location to log into Situation Hub answer the questions that alert their team. It alerts the home office team. All of us go into the virtual situation room and we can review the facts. If the facts are correct, you hit the button. Back to your original question, am I eliminating your job? No. I’m making your job run more smoothly and ensuring greater success. The other pushback I get is on the writing. Writer’s word nerds like me love our pros. My sentences and the app are not compound sentences with lots of commas. That is because humans fight over commas for 30 minutes. If I remove a comma in short declarative sentences, the process moves faster.
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. TCSP 37 | Crisis Communications   They have got to go out and manage their team. We have got to figure out who is sitting at that table that doesn’t have to put on a hazmat suit and run out with the pipe wrench to be the communications specialist. One of the things I was trying to do with Situation Hub is if you have a PR team, that makes it run faster. If you don’t have a PR team, it is the PR team in a box or this case PR team in an app. This has been super interesting. I loved hearing about your approach to this and how you are offering solutions for the industry to solve it. If people want to get in touch with you and have a conversation and learn more about what you are doing, how can they do that? The website to go to is SituationHub.com, and you will find my email address. You can email me at Info@SituationHub.com, and it will come right to my inbox. You can connect with me on Twitter @SituationHub. You can connect with me on LinkedIn at Gerard Braud. When you go to the Situation Hub website, in addition to there being demos, there is also a blog page that has one-hour masterclasses. It was like you have your community. We have done the same thing. That is the way to go these days. Once a month, we have a masterclass where we tackle some aspects of crisis communication. There are resources to be had, but take five minutes and take a look at something that could revolutionize your ability to save that revenue, reputation, and brand that we talked about. Gerard, thank you so much for sharing your story and sharing the Situation Hub with us. I appreciate it. Thanks so much for inviting me. You are very welcome. Thank you, everyone, for joining the show. Stay tuned for another great episode.
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About Gerard Braud

TCSP 37 | Crisis CommunicationsFor more than 25 years, crisis communications expert Gerard Braud (Jared Bro) has helped leaders on five continents with crisis communications plans, crisis media training and crisis communications drills.
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.