Braud Communications

Crisis Communications News Release Contest

November 9, 2021/0 Comments/in Public Relations /by gbraud

This is our crisis communications news release contest.

Rules: The clock is ticking. You need to get a statement posted to your website, emailed to the media, and emailed to your employees. Below is the statement that you have been given.

Do you post it and send it out as is?
Do you make edits?
If you make edits, write the time you begin editing and the time you complete the edits.
Email your revised script to Admin@SituationHub.com
You must explain your edits. A short video explaining your edits would be great.
If you make no edits, explain why.

Time edit begins ________

Fire at Houston

At ABC Chemical, one of our goals is to always keep our employees, our community, our customers, and the media apprised of activities at our facility.
We can confirm that at this time we are responding to a fire.
The event began at approximately 12:30 PM.
The address of this event is 123 Main Street, Houston, Texas.
The location of this event is commonly known as our Houston facility.
The event is ongoing.
We can confirm there are no known fatalities.
We can confirm there are no known injuries.
At this time everyone is accounted for.
We have requested assistance from the Houston Fire Department and EMS.
Members of our team are in the process of gathering additional facts about this event.
We encourage everyone to avoid speculating about the facts of this incident. Likewise, we caution the public that what you see on social media may not be accurate. We encourage you to rely only on information from official sources, such as agencies responding to this event.
We ask the media and all interested parties to expect additional updates from us.
We will post any updates to our website at CompanyName.com.
In the meantime, please bear with us.

Time edit ends ________

Total time spent editing _______

Download a PDF version of this crisis statement here:Download

Photo by Evy Prentice on Unsplash

Change the Way You Write Crisis Statements

November 8, 2021/0 Comments/in SituationHub /by gbraud

It is time to change the way you write crisis statements and crisis communication news releases.

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?

It begins with using short declarative sentences.

In crisis communications speed is critical.

If something is factually correct and fast it is better than overly word-smithed and slow.

If you tell the audience who, what, when, where, why, and how quickly, they will forgive the absence of writing in prose.

If you write the way people talk, your stakeholders will comprehend your message more quickly.

If you write your crisis statement like a TV news script, you greatly increase the likelihood that the media will copy and paste the bulk of your script into their script with minimal edits.

As a word nerd, I’m probably going to piss off a whole bunch of people with this blog. (Can we say “piss off”?) Ok… we don’t want to offend anyone, so let’s say we’re going to ruffle some feathers.

As word nerds, we were all taught proper writing styles by our English professors, our Public Relations professors, and even our Journalism instructors. If we wrote the way they wanted, we got an A. They were conditioning us.

But guess what? You are a grown-up. Your English teacher taught you something that worked great 20 years ago. Your Public Relations teacher is teaching you old-school techniques.

We’re going to give you permission to be a grown-up and carve your own path. We’re going to tell you to break the rules!

We’re going to dig deeper into this on our next Crisis Communications Master Class on Thursday, November 11, 2021 at 1 p.m. CST. Use this link to register for the class.

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

You will learn how to:

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

Sign up for the live class or sign up for the replay. Your free admission is courtesy of SituationHub.com

Crisis News Release Reality: This Scares Me

October 28, 2021/0 Comments/in SituationHub /by gbraud

With Halloween on the horizon, I thought I’d confess something that frightens me. The question is, am I more frightened than you?

It scares me to think how many companies are ill-prepared to communicate quickly with the media and their employees when they have a crisis. Boom – fire, explosion, workplace shooting, chemical release, natural disaster…

Does it scare you? It should. But most companies kick this can down the road. Being prepared is not a high priority. They think they will just magically figure it out as all hell is breaking loose. Yea… that never works. It’s frightening åhow many executives think this way.

It frightens me so much that I spent four years building an app called SituationHub.com.

In one to three minutes it can automatically write a crisis news release. Most ill-prepared companies take three to four hours to get a first statement out.

We have two months left in 2021. How about you set a goal for us to talk about how SituationHub can take away the fear for all those crises that can keep you up at night.

In the age of social media, you have only minutes to get communications out to the world. Can you get a message out in minutes? If you wait more than a few minutes, the media and social media can destroy you, your revenue, your reputation, and brand.

That should frighten you. But does it scare you enough to take action?

Use this link to schedule a time for us to talk.

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:

15 Questions to Ask Before You Use Facebook for Crisis Communications

Can You Handle a Crisis When it Hits by Winging It?

Crisis Management Lessons from Hurricane Katrina vs. COVID19

Photo by David Menidrey on Unsplash

Crisis Communications Master Class: The Golden Hour

October 19, 2021/0 Comments/in SituationHub /by gbraud

Last week’s crisis communications master class focused on the golden hour, a very critical time for those facing a crisis. If your company is facing a crisis, you must issue a statement to employees, the media, customers, and other stakeholders within one hour or less of the situation becoming known to the public. If you fail to communicate during the crisis communications golden hour, the narrative will get captured by others who may not know all of the facts.

What they post to social media will likely damage your revenue, reputation, and brand. The effects of that damage can be long-lasting. In this master class, we talk with Doug Levy, author of The Communications Golden Hour. Your host is SituationHub Founder and crisis communications expert Gerard Braud. The SituationHub crisis communications software platform can not only help you communicate effectively during the crisis communications golden hour, but SituationHub can actually write your first communications statement in 1-3 minutes. It turns the golden hour into the golden minutes.

Replay – Free Master Class – The Crisis Communications Golden Hour

Minutes and seconds count in a crisis. If you missed Thursday’s free Master class, the replay is now online.

Use this link to access the content.

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.

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

Your free registration for this Master Class is a gift from SituationHub.com. If your company has the potential to experience a crisis (and you know it does),

SituationHub is the fastest way to:

Gather the facts
Confirm the facts
Notify your crisis team
Write a statement for the media, your employees, and stakeholders.
…and do it all in a remarkable 3-10 minutes.

Be well; Be safe,

The SituationHub Team

SituationHub.com makes crisis communications move at the speed of social media. Use this link to schedule a free, private call https://calendly.com/braud/15min

To schedule a free, confidential demo for the crisis communications software SituationHub, visit: https://www.situationhub.com/#demo

CONNECT: https://twitter.com/situationhub

VISIT OUR SITE: https://www.situationhub.com/

Facebook Crisis Communication Lessons

October 6, 2021/0 Comments/in 5-Steps to Effective Crisis Communications, Social Media /by gbraud

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.

Essentially, Haugen confirmed how the algorithms focus on your bad news and get your crisis event in front of more eyeballs on Facebook, while your good news perishes. It’s why we strongly urge our clients NOT to use Facebook as part of their crisis communications strategy. A key takeaway line from social media marketing expert Jay Baer was his observation that you should never build your house on rented property, i.e. Facebook is rented property. You are better to build your house on your website.

We’ve often defined a crisis as any event that can damage an organization’s reputation, revenue, and brand. This week, Facebook is the poster child of crisis communication lessons.

A whistleblower calls out Facebook’s algorithms on 60 Minutes
Facebook’s stock value immediately takes a nosedive
Social media lights up with #DeleteFacebook
The whistleblower calls out Facebook’s algorithms before Congress
Facebook crashes
Facebook is slow to issue a crisis communications statement about its own crisis

Facebook’s response and behavior are very similar to how big tobacco and big chemical behaved in the 1970s. The chemical industry has made huge strides in their efforts to reduce chemical emissions, as well as in their crisis response. Big tobacco has seen their clientele disappear as it attempts to morph into a vaping business.

The Facebook crisis communications lessons will continue. Winston Churchill once said,

“Never waste a good crisis.”

To that extent, we believe that every crisis is a living classroom and worthy of your attention so you can learn from the success or failure of others in crisis. The lessons learned should serve as an incentive for you to engage in the 5 Steps to Effective Crisis Communications, so you can have the tools to communicate effectively should you face a crisis.

The Facebook crisis is a treasure trove of how not to handle a crisis. We suspect things will get much worse in the days and weeks ahead.

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:

15 Questions to Ask Before You Use Facebook for Crisis Communications

Can You Handle a Crisis When it Hits by Winging It?

Crisis Management Lessons from Hurricane Katrina vs. COVID19

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Pumpkin Spice Crisis Communications

October 1, 2021/0 Comments/in 5-Steps to Effective Crisis Communications /by gbraud

Pumpkin spice crisis communications is the latest craze among companies, CEOs, and public relations professionals. These are people who realize that Fall is here. We’re in the final quarter of the year, and they have failed to meet their goal of completing a crisis communications plan, their crisis communications news releases, their crisis drills, and the other components of their crisis communications strategies.

To welcome Fall and to embrace whatever panic you may have, we’re ready to help you sprint through the 5 Steps of Effective Crisis Communications. Just smell the aroma of rich crisis communications plan nutmeg, cinnamon news releases, ginger media training, and accents of cloves in your crisis communications drill!

Your challenge is to take a huge task – Crisis Communications – and make that task easy and fast. Fortunately, we pioneered this concept for you back in 2005. We figured out a way to let you customize a crisis communications plan in… you ready for this? Drum roll… five hours.

Yep, you can have a finished plan in five hours as we sprint through the process. (Of course, the secret pumpkin spice ingredient is that we’ve put more than 25 years of experience and more than 6,000 hours into development, just so you can create crisis communications magic in five hours.)

Sure, you can cook up your own crisis communications plan if you have 2,000 to 4,000 hours sitting on your spice rack… and who doesn’t? But if you don’t have the extra time, our Crisis Communications Sprint system is like pulling a box of carrot cake mix off the shelf in the morning and having a perfect crisis communications plan finished before dinner.

Your crisis communications plan is Step 2 of the 5 Steps. On the front end, you need to conduct a Vulnerability Assessment to evaluate all the “stuff” that might “hit the fan.” That’s Step 1.

The secret sauce to your crisis communications plan should be having a deep library of pre-written news releases. That’s Step 3. We have 100 pre-written news releases with your name on it. However, for some of you, your best bet is to subscribe to the SituationHub crisis communications news release app. SituationHub can actually write an advanced crisis communications news release in 3-5 minutes.

Some of you realize your greatest need to train your spokespeople. We call that Step 4, but often it is a perfect standalone training class. A single misplaced word can damage a company’s revenue, reputation, and brand in ways that are as foul as putting dill in your pumpkin spice mix.

The icing on the cake is Step 5, when you conduct a Crisis Communications Drill. That’s when you get to test your crisis communications plan, your crisis communications news release, you get to test your spokespeople, and you get to test the ability of your entire team to work together. A crisis communications drill can be agonizing and exhilarating all at the same time. Most importantly, it lets you make mistakes in private so you can correct them in private, without ever making those mistakes in public.

So, what is your next step? How about a free discovery call to discuss your specific needs?

Pull up a chair, order a Pumpkin Spice Latte, and how about you and I chat about your Pumpkin Spice Crisis Communications needs?

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:

15 Questions to Ask Before You Use Facebook for Crisis Communications

Can You Handle a Crisis When it Hits by Winging It?

Crisis Management Lessons from Hurricane Katrina vs. COVID19

Photo by Kira auf der Heide on Unsplash

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

Welcome to Our Crisis Communication Blog

Crisis Communications News Release Contest

Change the Way You Write Crisis Statements

You will learn how to:

Crisis News Release Reality: This Scares Me

Crisis Communications Master Class: The Golden Hour

Replay – Free Master Class – The Crisis Communications Golden Hour

We discuss:

SituationHub is the fastest way to:

Pumpkin Spice Crisis Communications

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