Braud Communications

Twitter versus Facebook: A Perfect Crisis Communications Case Study

November 4, 2019/0 Comments/in Crisis Communications /by gbraud

Crisis communication failures are easy for any expert to cite as an example of what not to do. It is far harder to find a crisis communication and crisis management case study where things are done correctly, because often the public never knows about a potential crisis that never reached a flash point.

Twitter, however, has publicly averted a crisis through both good crisis management and good crisis communications. The wisdom of their decision is punctuated by Facebook’s failure to avert a crisis.

Twitter has voluntarily decided to simply not run political ads. On the one hand, Twitter will lose ad revenue. On the other hand, Twitter doesn’t have to bear the blame of running false, deceptive, or divisive political ads.

We’ve made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally. We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought. Why? A few reasons…🧵
— jack (@jack) October 30, 2019

Facebook, meanwhile, in what appears to be a grab to earn all the money they can, has publicly said they will run political ads, while also confirming that they will not check to see if the ads are false. Put in simple terms, if you want to lie, Facebook will take your money in order to help you promote and spread your lie.

It is refreshing to see a CEO like Twitter’s Jack Dorsey do what is right, rather than doing what earns the most short term money. It shouts INTEGRITY. I’ve been fortunate enough to deal with many CEOs who are willing to take my advice to do what is right, even if it means earning less money in the short term.

Ultimately, when you do the right thing you reap long term rewards, which offsets the short term losses. Only time will tell if this is true for Twitter, but Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is going to give it a try.

Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg will simply add to their downward spiral of criticism. Facebook’s business model is to harvest as much of your personal data as possible, then sell that data to those who want to manipulate your beliefs for their own gain. This is true whether an ad targets you for laundry powder, toothpaste, or someone running for president of the United States.

Facebook, in many ways, is the platform that has made America so divided politically, because of the Facebook data harvested by Cambridge Analytica, which was used to benefit everyone from the Russians to political candidates in the 2016 presidential election.

Facebook’s engagement is down significantly because people are tired of having their data harvested and they are tired of seeing everything from divisive ads to divisive political memes from fake Facebook accounts. Ultimately, Facebook will be nothing more than a place where like-minded people gather to support their like-minded beliefs that are being reinforced by like-minded candidates who tell them what they already believe.

My suspicion is that Facebook is betting they can make big bucks by doing what I would professionally consider to be the WRONG thing. I suspect their short term gain will result in long term losses as more users leave the platform.

In the meantime, let me lift up Twitter and Jack Dorsey for every company and every CEO to see. There is never a wrong time to do the right thing.

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…”

More crisis communications articles:

How to Use Social Media for Crisis Communications

The Biggest Lie in Crisis Communications

4 Steps Every Company Needs to Take in Order to Avoid the Default Spokesperson

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Crisis Communications Case Study from California Wildfires and PG&E

October 28, 2019/0 Comments/in 5-Steps to Effective Crisis Communications /by gbraud

By Gerard Braud, CSP, Fellow IEC

The annual wildfire season in California is presenting us with an interesting crisis communication case study. I’d encourage you to follow media reports and listen to what each expert says in those media reports. As we review this crisis, we’ll look at it through the lens of the 5 Steps to Effective Crisis Communications, especially the concept of Step 1 – Your Vulnerability Assessment. (If you are not familiar with the 5 Steps of Effective Crisis Communications, follow this link for a free video tutorial.) Additionally, this crisis is a personification of defining a crisis as an event that affects a company’s revenue and reputation.

Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) has been dealing with a financial crisis after facing lawsuits leading from allegations that the company’s power lines may have started past fires that destroyed homes and took lives.

The liability is so devastating that PG&E has filed for bankruptcy. This is the personification of a crisis that is affecting a company’s revenue and reputation.

Now the electric company is fighting criticism because it has been shutting off power in fire-prone areas as a way to prevent fires. This again, is affecting the company’s revenue and reputation.

If you worked at PG&E, how would you manage this crisis? From the perspective of a Vulnerability Assessment, on one hand you have to assess the potential loss of property and lives if a fire breaks out because a faulty power line starts a fire. On the other hand, you have to assess the financial hardship the company is thrusting upon all of the businesses that cannot operate because they have no power.

One farmer showed the media how $50,000 worth of produce could go bad in his farm’s refrigerator unit that was now without power. This story is multiplied in many ways by many businesses, not to mention all of the homeowners affected by the outage.

My guess is PG&E will face a new round of lawsuits from homeowners and businesses that have faced losses because of the shutdown of power.

A further root cause analysis from a Vulnerability Assessment standpoint would have to examine all of the allegations that PG&E has not properly maintained their power lines, transformers, and equipment. Critics allege that failure to maintain the system is the root cause of the deadly fires. Other critics dig deeper, saying PG&E has spent too many years trying to give money to stockholders, rather than reinvesting in their infrastructure.

What do you know about the company where you work? Is it a publicly traded company that prioritizes stockholders over customers? Are there potential crises like this on your horizon? Do you see competing interests that need to be dealt with now, before they reach a flash point?

Your immediate course of action should be to gather your leadership team together and discuss these vulnerabilities before a crisis ignites. A good Vulnerability Assessment may provide a roadmap that allows you to eliminate a crisis before it ignites. If the crisis can’t be eliminated, it allows you to develop a plan to deal with the crisis if it ignites.

Photo by Marcus Kauffman on Unsplash

Who Should I Communicate with First in a Crisis?

October 21, 2019/0 Comments/in 5-Steps to Effective Crisis Communications /by gbraud

By Gerard Braud, CSP, Fellow IEC

Crisis communications and your crisis communications plan require you to know who your stakeholders are. In other words, who needs to hear your message when a crisis or disaster strikes?

In the 5 Steps to Effective Crisis Communications, Step 2 is writing your crisis communication plan. This is where you should both identify your stakeholders as well as prioritize which audiences are most critical to get your message to first.

(If you are not familiar with the 5 Steps to Effective Crisis Communications, watch our free 5-part video series. Just sign up with this link.)

Media once were the go-to top priority of audiences. That has changed drastically with the advent of email in the 1990’s and then the advent of social media in the mid-2000s.

The first crisis communications plan I wrote was in 1996 and it focused on getting a spokesperson to the media by way of an interview or a news conference. The media were and are the messengers to the masses. However, in 1996, many companies did not have company-wide email and many news organizations did not have either email or the internet. When I left my job as a television reporter in 1994, we had just gotten computers, but they didn’t even have spell check and they didn’t connect to the web. They were just fancy typewriters.

Email and social media have given employees a pathway to forward organizational information to reporters. This is cause for everyone in public relations and crisis communications to recognize that your employees may be your number one stakeholder audience in a crisis.

Ultimately, you need to decide for yourself and the organization you represent.

Here are your likely stakeholders:

Employees
Media
Customers
Your community
Certain elected officials

However, your crisis communications plan must reflect variables that allow you to prioritize who hears from you first during a crisis.

Which stakeholders should hear from you first in a crisis?

Who you communicate with depends upon:

The type of crisis taking place
The number of people you have on your communications staff

As a general rule, if your crisis sends the media rushing to your location to report on your breaking news, you should give them top priority as a stakeholder group. Why? Because if you fail to give them accurate information they will go into speculation mode, which you never want.

This quickly becomes a delicate dance, because your employees are likely hearing rumors and your job is to quell rumors by quickly providing facts.

So what do you do?

All audiences are important and your goal should be to get equal information to all audiences as simultaneously as possible. Your ability to do this depends upon how many people are on your communications staff.

If media are at your door waiting for a statement, my preference is that you go speak to them first, before you post any information to your website and before you share any information with your employees and before you post anything to social media.

The secret to success is by sharing one statement with all audiences. In Step 3 of the 5 Steps to Effective Crisis Communications, we urge you to focus on writing a library of pre-written statements.

That one statement should serve consistently to all audiences.

Do the dance.

The dance goes this way:

Read your edited statement to the media first, if they are on site.
As simultaneously as possible, publish that identical statement to your website newsroom.
As soon as the statement is published to the web, send an email to all employees who need to know the truth.
If you have critical audiences such as customers or government officials, they should also get an email with a link to your website newsroom.
If your organization uses social media, you can post a link back to your website newsroom.
Time permitting, you should take the same script you read to the media and use it as a video script. You then have the option to create a YouTube video that can be added to your website, as well as videos that can be shared on Twitter and Facebook.
Time permitting, you can use the same script to broadcast live on your most popular video channels.

Never publish your statement to your website newsroom if you plan to read it to the media. You don’t want reporters speed reading your statement and ruining your news conference with pre-mature questions.

Likewise, you don’t want your employees forwarding an email or web link to reporters before you send it to them yourself. When you send it to reporters, you are being honest and transparent. When an employee sends the notice to a reporter, then the reporter views this as a scoop from a source and may well blow it out of proportion.

If no media are at your door, your dance should go this way:

Publish your statement to your website newsroom
Email all employees who need to know
Email other important stakeholders
Post a link to social media directing people to your website newsroom.
Consider recording videos
Consider live videos

The bottom line is that all audiences are equally important. But Step 2 in the 5 Steps to Effective Crisis Communications is to write your crisis communications plan.

Your crisis communications plan should spell out:

Your stakeholder audiences
Your priority of which audience is communicated with
The variables for adjusting those priorities
The adjustments of your variables and priorities based on the number of people on your communications staff

As always, your crisis communications goes perfectly when these decisions are made on a clear, sunny day. Do not wait until you are in the midst of a crisis.

If we can help prepare you to communicate more effectively in a crisis, please reach out to us to ask for assistance. That’s why we’re here.

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…”

More crisis communications articles:

How to Use Social Media for Crisis Communications

The Biggest Lie in Crisis Communications

4 Steps Every Company Needs to Take in Order to Avoid the Default Spokesperson

Gerard Braud Crisis Communications Expert

Should You Use a Written Statement or a Video Statement for Crisis Communications?

October 14, 2019/0 Comments/in 5-Steps to Effective Crisis Communications /by gbraud

By Gerard Braud, CSP, Fellow IEC

In crisis communications many people are afraid to put a media spokesperson in front of the media for an interview or news conference. Often a company in crisis will ask, “Is it okay if we just issue a written statement? Do we have to do a news conference?” At the same time, corporate lawyers often write a statement and distribute it to the media, rather than having a news conference.

So which do you think is better? Should you use a written statement or an oral statement for crisis communications? And, as an option, can you issue a video statement?

First, recognize that written statements often feel canned. They used phrases such as, “Safety is our top priority,” even though the event is clearly an indication that safety was never the top priority.

Here are a few facts about written statements:

Written statements often feel cold, as though you are saying the absolute minimum.
Written statements often make it appear you are hiding the facts and the truth in a crisis.
Written statements often can be misinterpreted, because they lack the intonation of a voice.

When we speak, the audience can hear empathy, caring, and concern in our voice. For that reason, the spoken word is more powerful than the written word. Add to that the visual empathy and concern seen through facial expressions, and it should be a no brainer that any statement in which we hear a voice and see a human face is vastly more effective for crisis communications than a written statement.

Social media, Facebook Live, YouTube, YouTube Live, Twitter, Periscope and many other platforms make it easier than ever to record, publish, and share a statement during a crisis.

In the 5 Steps to Effective Crisis Communications, Step 3 is the concept of having 100 or more pre-written statements ready to use at a moments notice. (If you are not familiar with the 5 Steps to Effective Crisis Communications, sign up for our free 5-video course.) The pre-written statements should all be written for oral delivery. This means each statement is ready to be recorded and published to your crisis communications website or to your favorite social media platform.

You should note, that successfully recording a video or using a live social media video platform requires practice. In Step 4 of the 5 Steps, we emphasize the importance of media training. The same skills used to conduct an effective news conference can be used to record a video.

Does a video statement absolve you of your responsibility to conduct a news conference? No, it shouldn’t. In a crisis you should conduct interviews and/or news conferences. You should be prepared to successfully answer questions from the media.

However, if your organization tends to avoid news conferences in favor of printed statements, a video statement is an effective way to show more empathy, care, and concern.

If we can help you more successfully navigate the troubled waters of crisis communications, please reach out to us.

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…”

More crisis communications articles:

How to Use Social Media for Crisis Communications

The Biggest Lie in Crisis Communications

4 Steps Every Company Needs to Take in Order to Avoid the Default Spokesperson

When is the Flash Point of a Crisis?

October 7, 2019/0 Comments/in 5-Steps to Effective Crisis Communications /by gbraud

By Gerard Braud, CSP, Fellow IEC

In crisis communications, experts will tell you that speed is important. As a benchmark, in every crisis communications plan I write, the organization is expected to issue their first statement about their crisis within one hour or less of the crisis becoming known to the public. This can be considered your flash point.

In the world of fire and combustion, the flash point is that moment in which the heat rises to a level at which a flame is generated.

Apply this thinking to crisis communications. Think of there being two types of crises:
1. A Smoldering Crisis
2. A Sudden Crisis

A smoldering crisis can be compared to a bunch of oily rags in a hot garage. It takes a while for them to get hot. When they reach a certain temperature they start to smoke and smolder. As the temperature goes up further it all bursts into flames. We have a flash point.

A sudden crisis can be like a lightening bolt striking a house. The flash point is instantaneous. A sudden crisis can also be compared to striking a match. The flash point is instantaneous.

So in crisis communications, a smoldering crisis may be something such as an accusation of embezzlement or executive misbehavior. Internally a complaint may be filed or questionable practices may be uncovered and exposed. Certain internal decision makers know of this potential crisis, but the outside world does not.

In this type of smoldering crisis, the crisis communications team should receive a confidential briefing and they should immediately prepare a statement for all stakeholders. But initially, the organization is under no obligation to immediately issue a statement. The organization has time to decide their crisis management response, i.e. will the suspect employee be fired, suspended, etc.

The crisis management team also has a number of considerations.
• Whether this information can be kept private or if there is a high probability that the outside world will find out
• Sometimes, there is a legal obligation to tell the outside world
• Sometimes legal authorities are involved

In this type of smoldering crisis, the organization determines the flash point, defining it as the moment that they issue a statement to stakeholders, such as employees, the media, stockholders, customers, or any of the many variations of stakeholders.

If you fail to create your own flash point, your organization runs the risk of an outsider triggering the flash point, which immediately positions your organization in a defensive posture. Triggering the flash point yourself usually earns you more credibility with your stakeholders.

In a sudden crisis, the flash point is determined by the crisis. If your organization experiences an explosion, the flash point of the explosion is the flash point of your crisis and triggers your crisis communications clock. That clock is the mandate to issue a statement to the outside world within one hour or less of the onset of the crisis.

In the 5 Steps to Effective Communications, all 5 steps come into play regarding flash points.
1. During your Step 1 Vulnerability Assessment, you should identify the sudden crises and the smoldering crises.
2. In Step 2 as you write your Crisis Communications Plan, you must spell out your response behavior options based on whether you experience a sudden crisis or a smoldering crisis.
3. In Step 3 when you write your library of Pre-written Statements, the wording must consider the type of language used in a smoldering crisis versus the types of sentences you might use in a sudden crisis.
4. In Step 4, when you conduct Media Training, your spokespeople should be taught how to conduct a news conference and an employee meeting for both sudden and smoldering crises.
5. In Step 5, when you conduct your Crisis Drill or exercise, don’t fall into the trap of always holding an exercise that only deals with disasters and sudden crises. Mix in some smoldering issues as well.

Whether the flash point of your crisis is slow or the flash point of your crisis is sudden, effective crisis communications helps you put the bad news behind you so you can move on to recovery.

Should you need my assistance to accomplish any of the 5 Steps to Effective Crisis Communications, you can register for the 5 video course on the right hand sidebar of this blog, or reach me at 985-624-9976.

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…”

More crisis communications articles:

How to Use Social Media for Crisis Communications

The Biggest Lie in Crisis Communications

4 Steps Every Company Needs to Take in Order to Avoid the Default Spokesperson

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Is There a Difference Between a Crisis and a Disaster?

September 30, 2019/0 Comments/in 5-Steps to Effective Crisis Communications /by gbraud

By Gerard Braud, CSP, Fellow IEC

Technically, a disaster is a crisis. However, your organization can experience a crisis that is technically not a disaster.

In crisis communications and in your crisis communication plan, your organization should plan for two types of crises.

A sudden crisis
A smoldering crisis

What is the difference between a smoldering crisis and a sudden crisis?

A sudden crisis happens without warning. An explosion is a great example of a sudden crisis. By definition, that explosion can be a disaster.

A hurricane or a tornado can be both. They have an element of being a sudden crisis, but in reality, both are preceded by weather forecasts that warn the public of a possible strike. Absent is true predictability of exactly when and where they will strike, so that part of the crisis skews to the sudden side of the definition.

Executive misbehavior is a classic smoldering crisis.

How is a “crisis” defined?

Many public relations experts think a crisis is something that damages your organization’s reputation. This is true. But a good way to define a crisis is to think of it as any situation that escalates to the point of damaging both an organization’s reputation and its revenue.

Why is this distinction important? Executives and leaders view reputation management as a soft skill. When you begin to address a crisis as a situation that can affect revenue, you are likely to gain more respect and more attention.

When you position yourself as a strategic partner who is looking out for the organization’s bottom line, trust me… you’ll earn a seat at the table.

Many organizations wrongly focus on only crises that rise to the level of an emergency. That leaves a gaping hole in your level of preparedness and response.

In the 5 Steps to Effective Communications, Step 1 focuses on your Vulnerability Assessment. Your assessment, when done correctly, must include all sudden crises, such as emergencies, but also all smoldering crises.

Many organizations will tell you they have experienced far more damage to reputation and revenue by smoldering crises than they have to sudden crises.

Don’t create your own disaster by having a single crisis communications plan focus on disasters and emergencies. Expand your crisis communications plan and crisis communications strategies to include the smoldering events.

To learn more about how you can prepare for both a sudden and a smoldering crisis, we invite you to take a free deep dive into the 5 Steps to Effective Crisis Communications. Just click here to receive your 5 short videos that outline the 5 steps.

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…”

More crisis communications articles:

How to Use Social Media for Crisis Communications

The Biggest Lie in Crisis Communications

4 Steps Every Company Needs to Take in Order to Avoid the Default Spokesperson

Crisis communication resources to help you protect your revenue, reputation, and brand.

Welcome to Our Crisis Communication Blog

Crisis Communications Case Study from California Wildfires and PG&E

Who Should I Communicate with First in a Crisis?

Here are your likely stakeholders:

Who you communicate with depends upon:

The dance goes this way:

If no media are at your door, your dance should go this way:

Your crisis communications plan should spell out:

When is the Flash Point of a Crisis?

Is There a Difference Between a Crisis and a Disaster?

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