Posts for professionals who are passionate about crisis communication, emergency response, disaster recovery, business continuity, and public relations.

Safety is Our Top Priority

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“Safety is our top priority” is the most overused cliché in crisis communications and public relations.

What concerns me is that many corporate leaders believe their past safety record makes them immune to a crisis. Hence, they fail to invest time and money in the crisis communications plans and tools they need.

Just because it hasn’t happened to your company in the past is no indication it won’t happen in the future.

Why?

Many of your potential crises are essentially beyond your control. A case in point — two multi-day crises that were managed by Russ Roberts, formerly the Americas Operations Manager for ExxonMobil.

During his 20 years at ExxonMobil, there were two high-profile pipeline breaches that happened because of what most would consider outrageously bazaar events beyond the company’s control. Neither crisis would have shown up on anyone’s list of vulnerabilities.

Roberts was kind enough to share the lessons he learned with us during our May 1, 2023, Master Class on Crisis Communications. You can watch the entire program in the Master Class section of the SituationHub blog.

Among his best insights from the Master Class are:

Have a plan and follow the plan

During a pipeline spill, as team members assembled in the crisis command center, Roberts says numbers of smart, young engineers were verbalizing ideas about how to respond. After about five minutes of endless chatter and ideas, the veteran Incident Commander stood on a chair and dropped a large red binder on a table. It created a thunderous thud that cause the room to fall silent. The incident commander then shouted, “Follow the damn plan!”

He explained that the plan was written on a calm day with clarity of thought and that such a process helps to override the anxieties and fog of war that happens during a crisis.

The Braud Communications website offers great options for crisis communications plans that are designed to be read, followed, and executed in real time during a crisis. As a bonus, Braud Communications practices the “Sprint” process, which allows a company to complete a plan in one day, rather than the usual six months to one year.

Rely on news release templates

Working with the ExxonMobil lawyers, the public relations team had numerous preapproved templates with language that had been previously cleared as safe to use by the legal team. This helped to speed up the approval process.

At SituationHub, we’ve taken this concept much further, by creating hundreds of event-specific templates designed to be tested and preapproved by a company’s legal team. The templates generated a fact-based, ready-to-use news release in as few as 90 seconds. If you haven’t seen SituationHub in action, you really should schedule a private demo.

The Golden Hour has become the Golden Minute

For decades companies practiced the public relations rule that a statement should be released to the media and other stakeholders within the first hour of your crisis becoming public knowledge.

Roberts points out that the proliferation of mobile phones and social media means a company can lose control of a crisis in the first minute, as an on-looker adds photos and video to social media. We agree, which is why we built SituationHub to write a crisis communications news release at the speed of social media.

Sadly, most companies struggle to meet even the one-hour rule. You can learn more about the concepts of the Golden Hour and the need for speed in our Master Class with Doug Levy, author of The Communications Golden Hour.

Conclusion

It has been said many times that “If you fail to plan, then plan to fail.” We agree.

If you need help with your crisis communications, writing a plan, or subscribing to SituationHub, we invite you to set up a private call.

To set goals, talk about your needs, and formulate a budget, schedule a complimentary, confidential call with me https://calendly.com/situationhub

Crisis communications and media training expert Gerard Braud, CSP, Fellow IEC is based in New Orleans. Organizations on five continents have relied on him to write their crisis communications plans and to train their spokespeople. He is the Founder of SituationHub, the President of Braud Communications, and the author of “Don’t Talk to the Media Until…”

Crisis Communications Podcast: Be Prepared to Protect Your Revenue, Reputation, and Brand

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In this crisis communications podcast, CEO of the Independent Lubricant Manufacturers Association Holly Alfano interviews me about the often overlooked piece of running a business: crisis communications and preparation.

How is a crisis defined? Ask, “Will this event affect our company’s revenue, reputation, and brand?” Stop thinking of only situations such as a fire, a pandemic, or a hurricane. Start thinking of the vulnerabilities of your specific business. Start thinking about your CEO taking a photo with the wrong person, at the wrong time. Start thinking about one of your employees saying the wrong thing on social media.

Start thinking about who should be your spokesperson in a crisis. It may not be who you would expect. Stop thinking a crisis won’t happen to you. Start thinking, if this happens to me, to our company, to our organization, do we have the crisis communication tools to respond and communicate quickly?

In case this sounds overwhelming or stressful, thankfully, there are five simple steps to manage a crisis effectively. Just five steps. And thankfully, there is an automated software that can help you communicate to your clients, customers, employees, and stakeholders in a crisis.

  1. Vulnerability Assessment
  2. Crisis Communications Plan
  3. Library of Pre-written news releases (Use SituationHub.com)
  4. Spokesperson media training
  5. Crisis communications drill

If these sound foreign to you, we take a deep dive into these five steps in the podcast.

Listen to the podcast here.

To set goals, talk about your needs, and formulate a budget, schedule a complimentary, confidential call with me https://calendly.com/braud/15min

Crisis communications and media training expert Gerard Braud, CSP, Fellow IEC is based in New Orleans. Organizations on five continents have relied on him to write their crisis communications plans and to train their spokespeople. He is the author of “Don’t Talk to the Media Until…”

3 Crisis Communications Master Class Recordings to Listen to Before the New Year

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The year is almost over, and you may be asking yourself, what have I learned? What would I do differently? Have I prepared my organization for effective crisis communications?

Sure, it’s the busiest time of year. Thankfully, as you are wrapping presents, making Christmas cookies, and trimming the tree, you can pop in your Airpods and learn on the go. Although we hosted many crisis communications Master Classes this year, here are just three you can mark off your bucket list and not feel overwhelmed by the task or what you learned. Consider it our gift to you.

Crisis Communications Master Class: Change the Way You Write

The world has changed and so must you.

The world doesn’t have time to read what you wrote. Yet, you need the world to comprehend your message. So, what’s the secret?

Use this link to access the replay.

You’ll learn 10 reasons why you should change how you write a crisis communications statement.

Crisis Communications Master Class – The Crisis Communications Golden Hour

Minutes and seconds count in a crisis. Preparation is the key to fast crisis response. We dig deeper into the need for speed in your crisis communications and explore the tools you need to effectively communicate.

Use this link to access the content.

We discuss:

  • How to organize communications so that crucial information gets out fast
  • Why some messages work better than others
  • How to choose the right words
  • Skills to be an effective spokesperson
  • What you need to know about special populations or other unique factors in your audience

Facebook Crisis Communication Lessons

The Facebook crisis communications lessons are many. The explosive interview on 60 Minutes and the testimony before Congress from whistleblower Frances Haugen confirms and reinforces the crisis communication lessons we discussed in the SituationHub Master Class that originally aired live on March 11, 2021. The Master Class is called The Social Media Conundrum. You’ll want to watch that program, in which we zeroed in on why Facebook’s algorithms are built against you in a crisis.

Crisis communications and media training expert Gerard Braud, CSP, Fellow IEC is based in New Orleans. Organizations on five continents have relied on him to write their crisis communications plans and to train their spokespeople. He is the author of “Don’t Talk to the Media Until…”

Crisis Communications Master Class: Change the Way You Write

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The world has changed and so must you.

The world doesn’t have time to read what you wrote. Yet, you need the world to comprehend your message. So, what’s the secret?

If you missed last week’s crisis communications master class use this link to access the replay.

You’ll learn 10 reasons why you should change how you write a crisis communications statement.

In the class, we challenged conventional writing and crisis management wisdom, we ruffled feathers, we insulted your English teacher, challenged your Public Relations professor, brushed off your legal team, and empowered you to change the way you write crisis communications statements.

We focused on ways to:

  • Increase comprehension by your stakeholders
  • Ensure greater accuracy by the media
  • Speed up the statement approval process
  • …and much more

As a bonus, schedule a confidential discovery call to privately discuss the crisis communications challenges that you want to conquer in 2021 by using this link https://calendly.com/braud/15min

Be well; be safe; be prepared,

The SituationHub Team

Crisis communications and media training expert Gerard Braud, CSP, Fellow IEC is based in New Orleans. Organizations on five continents have relied on him to write their crisis communications plans and to train their spokespeople. He is the author of “Don’t Talk to the Media Until…”