How Crisis Communications Strategies Enable Fast Response with Gerard Braud - Ep. 215

And in the case of the chemical industry in particular, as we, you know, as you guys know, within my target audience here, Knowing that story, 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, I'm gonna link to that episode because I'm sure there's still something for you to learn from that.

Um, we're gonna kind of have a refresh conversation talking about how chemical companies and leaders can be ready to respond. So Gerard welcome to the Chemical Show.

Every time there was a fire and explosion release. I have to deal with community activists, I have 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 the microphone with a TV camera, recording them and putting them on the air. And I didn't, oh my gosh. Didn't do it 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 and as I would do the media training, my, my chemical clients needed it to be crisis communications media training. Mm-hmm. They weren't cutting ribbons or, 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, and your first key message is safety is our top priority and our second key message, or

our employees are our greatest asset, and our third. Key messages we give to the United Way, and 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. And it was just it.

It was comical to me and my real cynic and 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 a net a, a whole bunch of Word documents that were pre-written news releases so that we could get 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 20th 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. Uh, so that. They're, they're able to get a statement out in three to five minutes instead of three to five hours.

Wow. I'm constantly fighting this three to five hour. 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. Yeah. So that's, that's my origin story to where I am today as the evangelist to prepare and to get statements out fast.

You know, somebody may be able to 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 wins have to have somebody else do it. But. The information to the communications team doesn't get to them in time.

And then when it does get to them, they have to write a news release. And then after they spend 30 to 45 minutes writing the news release, they take it into a bunch of non-writers, engineers, and they say, what do you think? And those people tear it 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 in three and a half hours pass, and what I invented with Situation Hub 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 a truck accident, choose truck accident. Workplace injury. Choose workplace injury. It feeds you questions. It's, it's all about the brilliant prompts that we wrote for it. And 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, minutes has situational awareness. So from the flash point until you answer the questions is. Three to five minutes, depending on, that's amazing how critical your vent 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 Situation Hub is. Situation, hubs, writing like a journalist, and it's just facts. 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 20 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 Situation Hub is, you know, ideal on a nice computer screen, but it works well on your phone, works well anywhere. And instead of carrying here, I've, I've got one of my old crisis communications plans here.

My gosh, that's what I, my right, that was a hundred pre-written news releases. That's a ream and a half 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 Situation Hub. 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

Uh, at this point in time, uh, I'll take a risk at looking at a small controversy that's in the news every day, right? So, uh, we are what years? This is 2025, and Donald Trump is president of the United States. That's this moment in time, and Elon Musk is helping him, and as Elon Musk does things. 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 40, 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, 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. Uh, we constantly see along the, the Gulf Coast and the Atlantic Coast that hurricanes come in and damage facilities. Causing releases. yeah, all of that stuff can be a crisis.

You also have your, what I would call your executive white collar type crisis bribes. That on that sexual harassment. But you can also have cyber events. If you get cyber attack, that's a 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 Like one of my chemical companies using Situation Hub logs in there are more than 80 different templates that they can choose and, and if you go to situation hub.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. And that's just a perfect to do a hit list for yourself and see, geez, how many of these things could happen to me?

How do we communicate quickly, uh, for

Incomplete information and this belief or desire that if I just wait a little bit longer, I have more information and it's gonna 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?

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. I, in Situation Hub, it's listed as a one first critical statement. It's the first template that shows up on the list of 80 vets.

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 it. 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 along to you. It'll cover whether anybody's dead, whether anybody's injured, whether anybody's missing. If necessary, it'll have an empathy statement to 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 it reads 15 sentences are gonna be approximately 90 seconds in reading time. This is something, you know, if you're an old TV guy, 15 sentences sentence 90 seconds. So with 90 seconds of information given to the media, that gives them 90 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 started 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 better, 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 Situation Hub, you can go back into the app, you create 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 20,

30 minutes has passed, you know a lot more now regarding privacy issues, in my app it is built to where. It covers. Fatality, uh, 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 name to say what their injuries are and 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, the internal lawyers all said, you can't say Bob has covid. That's a violation of of hipaa.

You can only say Bob's not at work today. So the privacy issues are all addressed in my software platform, certainly, and if there are still executives who think that's a problem. They need to address it on a clear, sunny day and not battle it out in the crisis command center on the day of the crisis.

What I don't really specialize in is keeping it from ever breaking. Don't let the crisis happen. And if the crisis does happen, hey, 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. And, and 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 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 and blow it up real good. And that actually happened to me. I actually have a soundbite of guys saying it blow up real good. I used it a lot of my, my training classes. But then I'm talking to somebody who doesn't have the facts.

don't even have to go knock on the door. with Situation Hub, 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, and 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 90 seconds long, and I've produced a 92nd script. Situation hub. Hey, guess what? I just wrote the reporter story.

People are ignorant when it comes to what our chemicals. What are their good uses? They immediately go to the fear of what chemicals are. So many reporters doing stories in the chemical industry or ill-informed. And then 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 'em word for word when we do it.

Absolutely. What about Absolutely. So, so Gerard the other thing I see happening, maybe just inhibits the whole time aspect of it. and certainly I could see where this is true with smaller companies is not knowing, you know, kind of the who's on first who gets to make that, you know, approve the press release, approve the statement, you having that person ready to speak. see that happening a lot or has that been sorted out?

But you also have to 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 Who are your spokespeople? Because

in the early moments of the crisis, I can't send a subject matter expert out. I need to send a PR person out to read the first statement because my main managers. Need to be managing the incident, not managing the media. You know, I always said that about Tony Hayward in the BP crisis, Tony Hayward should have been managing the business and, and the, 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, damage to the revenue, reputation, and grants 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.

Talking to the media is like no other interview you will ever do, and, and the questions are what? Kill people, right? Yeah. You can come out and make a statement, but it's your questions where you say one wrong word and everything goes bad. What I built into situation hub was sentences that are bulletproof and sentences in a statement that answer questions before they get asked. Yeah. So for example, uh, a news release might say, we can confirm there is one fatality. Okay?

If you say that, you'll be asked, who is it? Or you're given their name,

I'm actually, personally, I'm often quite disappointed now in the immediate. In the immediate moment. You know what? Yeah, absolutely. There was an incident. we are addressing it. We can confirm that there was an incident that that immediate confirmation. Great. But when three hours or six hours or 24 hours has gone on and it's still well, company spokesperson, I'm like,

They said, he said that he now wants to say differently.

Right. And it just eats up time and, and when I first rolled out Situation Hub, that was actually one of the things I got from PR people was, well, there's no quote in here. Every sentence is quotable. And now that we're seeing companies use situation have been a crisis and they're pulling four and five soundbites, not only are they're pulling four and five soundbites that the person read from the script.

They were pulling the same soundbites from TV station to TV station to TV station, and that was always because I know there are certain catnip sort of phrases that 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 script is all of the transitions are built in, all of the

quotes are built in. You don't have to have 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. Yeah. The company said they would conduct an investigation to find out what happened, how it happened, and how we keep it from happening again. Mm. That gets quoted every time.

Every morning when you hear someone say, safety is our top priority. I'm so tired of the phrase, safety is our top priority, or we're committed to safety. It's not true. 'cause if you were, y'all wouldn't be having the problem today. Y'all wouldn't be on the CBS evening news and the NBC nightly news and all the other

No doubt about it, but it's used in such a platitude kind of a way that it loses its power. it loses power. So, so Gerard this has been really good and, You know, if you were gonna leave people with one message for, you communications, what would it be?

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 Awesome. It's all about preparation and having the right tools in