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When “It” Hits the Fan: Effective Crisis Communication for the Chemical Industry

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Williams ExplosionBy Gerard Braud –

It’s an honor to be invited to deliver the morning keynote presentation today to the Chemistry Council of New Jersey at their 2015 Conference. You can view today’s handout here.

The crisis communications lessons being discussed on stage serve as a reminder to everyone in the C-Suite, in emergency response, and in public relations, that news travels fast. The faster the news travels, the faster a corporation must respond. Smart phone technology and social media are changing the rules for both corporations and the media.

Now is also a good time to compare your traditional approach to crisis communications with what should be your new normal. The emphasis in that sentence is the word NEW combined with NORMAL.Williams FB page

What got ‘ya here won’t get ‘ya there could be the best advice I can share. Yet many industries have traditionally failed to successfully get to the old normal, much less embrace the new normal.

Traditionally, many chemical and heavy manufacturing companies operate without a public relations employee or team. Some have one public relations person while others have several. It really depends upon the size of the  geismarcompany. But regardless of the whether you have a public relations staff or not, corporate crisis communications often takes a back seat to emergency response. Furthermore, news releases are often delayed by executives who excessively scrutinize each word and comma. Sometimes delays are caused by lawyers who oppose the concept of the news release.

Many chemical companies also make the mistake of delegating all of their crisis communications to law enforcement, following the guidelines of the National Incident Management System (NIMS). While police can be effective in communicating precautions or evacuations from a chemical crisis, the flaw with NIMS is that law enforcement spokespeople are not able to communicate empathy on behalf of the company.

The most frightening case study I’ve observed regarding the chemical industry, involves the media, social media, and crisis communications.  On the morning of June 13, 2013 there was a tragic explosion and fire at the Williams Olefins Chemical plant in Geismar, LA, about 50 miles from my home, which killed 2 workers and injured more than 100. Before the company had a single news release issued, or before they provided any images or videos posted to the web, someone published a Facebook page with more details than the chemical company ever gave.

My research indicates it took nearly three hours for the company to put up an official news release on their website. The goal I would ask any corporation to aim for is to have an official news release on your website within one hour or less.

One hour is a reasonable goal if you recognize that you don’t have to know everything or state all of the facts in your initial release. It is perfectly acceptable for you to publish a few facts at a time as you get them. That is why in my presentation today I strongly recommended that people use my first critical statement as a fast alternative to writing a formal press release. To get a free download use the coupon code CRISISCOMPLAN when you select the item from my shopping cart.

Industry leaders and executives should keep in mind that eye witnesses to an event are posting images, rumors or details to social media as soon as a crisis happens. This means that your one hour news release may still be 59 minutes behind the first eyewitness account. However, it is much better than a three hour delay as seen in the case study above.

Don’t let a similar situation be your demise.

Social Media When “It” Hits the Fan

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schock2By Gerard Braud –

Why are so many powerful people oblivious to the potent, negative power of social media? Every day there is a new crisis communication case study and today it is from Aaron Schock, who has resigned as Congressman from Illinois.

Schock created his own crisis with excessive selfies and posts on social media, showing him engaged in a rather lavished lifestyle of travel. This raised questions about whether taxpayers were footing the bill for his fun.

Tip 1: Establish guidelines for what should be posted and what should not be posted as an official representation of the corporation and the leadership of that organization.

schock1Tip 2: Review your current social media policy for all employees to make sure best practices are being followed. If you don’t have a social media policy for employees, make it a priority to write one.

Tip 3: In a corporate environment, require that three people concur about an image or post before it is shared on social media. Get feedback from one another to measure positive and negative reaction before anything goes online.

If you have a great social media policy that you’d like to share with your public relations colleagues please send it to me at gerard (at) braudcommunications.com

If you’d like guidance on setting up a system that works for your corporate culture just give me a call at 985-624-9976.schock3

5 Crisis Communication Tips to Prevent Secret Service Style Delays

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clancyBy Gerard Braud –

Secret Service Director Joseph Clancy said it took five days before he was informed that a car carrying two agents struck a security barrier outside the White House.

How long does it take in your company for you to find out about an event that could be a potential crisis that requires you to implement your crisis communications plan and begin communicating with the media, employees, customers and other stakeholders?

Most public relations people tell me it is a constant challenge for the home office, leadership, and PR staff to find out what is going on in the field. Often, you find out only because the rest of the world has already found out and the issue is getting negative attention on social media or with the mainstream media.

How do you change this? It begins with new policies and procedures, supported by employee training, as outlined in the five tips below.

The reality is that the average employee, supervisor or manager is mostly afraid that they will get in trouble if they report a problem, large or small.

But an unreported problem creates problems for those of you who are the company expert in public relations, crisis communications and media relations.

Ultimately, you need to know about events that could damage the company’s reputation and revenue.

What are your solutions?

Tip 1: Conduct training programs that inform employees about the need to protect the company’s reputation and revenue through good reporting. Many employees and leaders never really make the full connection to the bottom line. Help them.

Tip 2: Establish an easy way for employees to notify the home office of a potential problem.

Tip 3: Train employees to get in the habit of using that notification method.

Tip 4: Provide positive recognition for employees who use the reporting mechanism and appropriate repercussions for employees who fail to report an event that could damage either reputation or revenue.

Tip 5: Do your part to speed communications by spending time on a clear sunny day to write a library of pre-written, fill-in-the-blank news releases so that you are not responsible for delaying crisis communications.

Crisis communications is a team effort and the team needs to be built for speed, both in the field and in the public relations office. One way to address this is to use the current Secret Service headlines to open a discussion with your executive staff.

If you have a great system you’d like to share with your public relations colleagues, please send me your thoughts in a guest blog post. gerard (at) braudcommunications.com

If you would like to discuss best practices for a public relations and crisis communications team built for speed, feel free to call me at 985-624-9976.

Brand Judgment Day

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Racist chantBy Gerard Braud –

Judgment day in the Biblical sense is the Godly determination of your fate at the end of time.

We’ve been taught that we do not know the hour or the day of our death or judgment.

But in the world of your brand, your products, and your services, we do know the day and we do know the hour. In fact, we know the minute.

The time is now. Social media and the throngs of participants on social media could be described as the most judgmental slice of humanity that civilization has ever seen.

Last week I watched two national stories unfold that led to a lot of online judgement. The first was the story about the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity members singing a song filled with racial slurs. The second story babyswaddled in american flagwas about a photographer who posted a picture of a baby swaddled in an American flag.

[My goal is to interview both the fraternity brothers and the photographer to learn more about their experiences of being judged so harshly and so quickly. If you can introduce me to any of these folks, please call me.]

Swift social media judgment is a rather interesting phenomenon, considering the societal emphasis placed on political correctness. The political correctness movement had its roots in the 1990s.

When you think about it, an entire generation of young people have been taught that a person should not be judged by the color of their skin, or their ethnic background, or their religion. From there it grew into not criticizing someone because of his or her sexual orientation or gender identity.

Perhaps an unintentional consequence of the political correctness movement is that many people feel compelled to correct everyone else’s speech or behavior. Essentially, people anointed themselves as the police of appropriateness. Individuals became self-ordained. Many attempt to shame the rest of the world into adhering only to thinking as they do and approving only what they approve.

So would this also be true? Would it be true that as the political correctness movement spreads, parents, teachers, and well-intentioned folks enable a new breed of judgment that replaced the kind of judgment they were actually fighting against? Did they endorse and encourage judgment? And was the new judgment harsh?

For a large segment of the population, every day is the day they judge everyone around them. Hence, everyday is judgment day.

About this same time political correctness judgment took hold, talk show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh began their own breed of judgment. This opened the floodgates of copycat radio shows, which made many older adults also increase their level of harsh judgment and verbal criticism.

As this age of judgment was born, unto everyone was also born the Internet, social media, and technology.

Blogging and anonymous comments on blogs represented phase one of judgment. Phase two of judgment began when media news websites opened their doors to anonymous comments. Then phase three emerged with the birth of Facebook and Twitter.

Specifically to Facebook and Twitter, what could be a platform for sharing joy and goodness has become the trolling grounds for those who judge, hate and comment negatively with gusto. Social media can be a real hellhole for your brand.

The truth is, we all judge and pass judgment with every thought. You have thoughts about the products you buy, services you contract for, people you encounter at work, etc. You also have thoughts about every person you see. Your mind creates a near immediate impression as to whether you initially like someone or not. Your judgment on that may change within moments. You make judgments based on what a person is wearing, their body type, their ethnic background, and what they say.

You are in judgment of others, regardless of whether you have pleasant thoughts about a person or negative thoughts.

But do you verbalize every conceivable thought you have or have you been taught the art of self-control?

Many of us were taught the adage, “If you can’t say something nice about somebody, then don’t say anything at all.”

The political correctness age shifted that to, “If someone says something that is not nice about someone you should correct him or her and put them in their place.”

That is called judging those who judge.

This has all morphed into a self-ordained right to comment on social media about everything in society. I don’t see it stopping anytime soon.

 

The Self-Centered Media and How it Affects You  

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By Gerard Braud –

gerard braud ron burgundyThe media love their gadgets. They also love promoting their gadgets.

At KSLA 12 in Shreveport, Louisiana, LifeEye12 was our mother ship. That is why I laughed so hard when the opening scene of the movie Anchorman shows Ron Burgundy stepping out of his helicopter. I’m not, however, laughing at CNN’s disgraceful coverage of the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama.

Disgraceful, I say, because of CNN’s coverage of their drone video of an empty bridge.

KSLA Gerard Braud HelicopterFlashback to the 1970’s and 80’s — a news helicopter was the epitomy of status and the gadget of all news gadgets. At KSLA, it was
so important for us to mention and show the helicopter that I was almost fired as weekend anchor because I failed to show our anchorman landing in LifeEye12 at a local festival. Silly newsman and journalist Gerard Braud thought it was more important to report on the four different stories involving fatalities that day than to feature our helicopter. CNN is the latest sinner. CNN is using a drone and they are supporting my premise of the media making it all about them. (See Chapter 3 of my book Don’t Talk to the Media Until…)

Jon Stewart did a brilliant job of calling out CNN for their excessive coverage of the fact that they were using a drone to photograph the Edmund Pettus Bridge, even though there were no people on the bridge. If you haven’t seen it, watch this clip four minutes in. He calls out their sin better than I can even dream to.

gerard braud drone story

Click to watch video

The lesson for all of you is that each day it becomes harder to get the media’s attention. CNN would rather spend valuable airtime talking about themselves and their drone than reporting on the issues of the day. And because media copy media, you can expect to see valuable airtime on your local television station wasted as your local media praise themselves for buying, owning, and using the same toy that all of us have access to.

Cold Facts About High Bills: Crisis Communications Tips for Angry Customers

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electric cooperative high bills gerard braudBy Gerard Braud –

Today’s crisis communications tip looks at what happens when angry customers take to Facebook to complain about your company. Complaints on your Facebook page or complaints on a Facebook group page built for and by the complainers is creating public relations problems for companies.

All of us can learn from this perfect crisis communication lesson — It can be found at every utility company, where customers who are angry about their high winter bills and are venting their frustration and anger on Facebook.

Many utility companies do exactly what they should not do: They do nothing.

The men and women in leadership positions at both investor owned electric companies and rural electric cooperative companies have spent decades practicing the art of hope, as in, “I hope this just goes away.”

Hope is not a crisis communications strategy, especially in the age of social media.

However, engaging with these angry customers on Facebook can be problematic because social media is filled with traps.

Trap 1: If you comment on a post that is either positive or negative, it can lead to an exponentially high number of negative responses.

Trap 2: If you comment on any Facebook posts, it sends it to the top on everyone’s news feed.

What do you do?

Solution One: Fix the problem and/or make the anger and hostility go away. The reality is there will never be a refund for electricity used. And chances are, the customer has forgotten that their bill was likely this high during the coldest month of the year 12 months ago and just as high during the hottest month of the year six months ago. But they would rather blame their electric winter storm cleoncompany than to take personal responsibility.

The solution is to manage the expectations of the customer by eliminating the peaks and valleys in their bill by offering an option to have what many companies call bill averaging or bill levelization. It means the customer will see nearly the same amount on their bill every month. Often, it will reduce this month’s $400 bill to an easier to pay $250 bill, which makes the customer happier.

Solution Two: Take the discussion offline. In many cases, the best way to handle an angry customer is to have customer service pick up the phone and call them directly. Customer service is able to demonstrate the type of soothing, personal concern that would be lost on a Facebook post.

Make the Crisis Go Away

The problem with the, “I hope it goes away” philosophy is that the problem will go away within the next two months as spring arrives and many customers use little, if any heating or air conditioning. But the problem will return during the hottest month of the year, then go away, then return next winter.

If you have a solution that can make the crisis go away once an for all, then by all means do it.

When “It Hits the Fan: Effective Communications for Critical Times

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By Gerard Braud —

The need for crisis communication has never been greater. The need for speed in crisis communications has never been greater.

Williams ExplosionThe reality is that if you experience an incident that the public knows about, you should be communicating to them about it in one hour or less. The biggest problem with this one hour benchmark is that in a world with Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, that is still 59 minutes too long.

Look at this photograph. What do you see? Yes, those are workers running from a fireball as it is still rising. What else do you notice? Yes, when everyone should be moving toward safety someone stopped to snap a picture with a cell phone.

This event eventually claimed two lives and resulted in more than 100 reported injuries.

Williams FB pageWithin minutes of the photo being taken, workers built a complete Facebook page about the event. Meanwhile, the company took nearly three hours to issue the first news release. Other than the time of the event, there was nothing in that statement that was newsworthy or that could not have been written and approved three years before the event. It was boiler plate language. By the time it was released, the media and the public already knew every detail.

When “it” hits the fan in the age of social media, you have the option to control the flow of accurate information by releasing details faster than ever before. If you fail to do this you surrender control of the story to the general public, who may or may not have accurate information.

Granted, human resources needs to communicate with the families of the dead and injured. Granted, lawyers will want to avoid giving ammunition to the plaintiff’s attorney in your statement. Granted, facts need to be gathered by the home office. Granted, state police are acting as the primary spokespeople under a NIMS agreement.

But will you also grant this? The photo on Facebook and the Facebook page are providing more information to the public, the media, and plaintiff’s attorney than the official source is. And NIMS can provide a law officer to discuss evacuations, but a state trooper cannot express the necessary empathy that families need to hear, nor can they communicate the contrition that a community needs to hear.

What should you do? How can you get the upper hand?

Step one is to have an effective crisis communications plan that facilitates the fast gathering of information about any incident, combined with the fast dissemination of the details to key decision makers.

Step two is to have a “First Critical Statement” document in your crisis communications plan. The First Critical Statement is a fill-in-the-blank document that can be modified in five minutes and then posted to your corporate website, emailed to all employees, emailed to all media, read to the media at a news conference if needed, and also used as a link on your corporate social media sites.

(Get a free sample and use the coupon code CRISISCOMPLAN)

Step three is to write a library of pre-written news releases with a more in depth system of fill-in-the-blank and multiple-choice options. Such news releases can be written on a clear sunny day, months or years before you will ever need to use them. The goal of the document is to answer every question you might be asked about a specific incident – ranging from fires and explosions, to workplace violence, to executive misbehavior. The pre-written nature of the release allows your leaders and legal teams to proofread the templates and pre-approve them. This saves time on the day of your incident. Usually, the pre-written document can be edited within ten minutes and approved nearly as fast. Once it is ready to use, it can be your script for a news conference, a post to your corporate website, an e-mail to all media and employees, plus a link on social media.

Check your calendar: It’s 2015. Check your computer and smartphone: Social media amplifies everything the public sees or thinks. Check your decision-making: It is time for you to have a modernized fast moving crisis communications plan.

The bottom line is that your reputation and revenue depend upon it.

Media Interview Training Tips from Jimmy Kimmel and the Oscars

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By Gerard Braud

Media interviews are jimmykimmeloften composed of opinion questions. Jimmy Kimmel Live provides us with today’s timely media interview perspectives, with interviews about the Oscars. As you watch and laugh at this, read on to the crisis communications tip at the end of this article.

Reports are infamous for asking leading questions. In media training classes, each potential spokesperson should be cautioned about not taking the bait when a reporter asks a leading question. In other words, when a premise is injected by the reporter, expert media training should teach the spokesperson to have the freedom to reject the premise.

Jimmy Kimmel live does a great gag called Lie Witness News, in which a fake reporter conducts what are known as “man on the street interviews.”

The Academy Awards is one of the most hyped events of the year. There’s a lot of pressure to have an informed opinion about the movies that are nominated. So, Kimmel sent a camera onto Hollywood Boulevard to ask people what they thought about some nominated movies and moments he made up.

What these people do is something you don’t want to do. They take the bait.

Be aware of another lesson that falls under the crisis communications category.

When your organization experiences a crisis, reporters will go looking for quotes and sound bites. If your company and your spokesperson fail to provide a fast sound bite or quote, the media will conduct man on the street interviews. These man on the street interviews are with uninformed individuals who have not had media training and are willing to take the bait to enjoy 15 seconds of fame.

Jimmy Kimmel creates some great laughs with his gag. If this happens to you in real life it is no laughing matter.

Brian Williams Suspended: Layers of a Media Crisis for NBC & Williams

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Brian-DailyBy Gerard Braud —

Leave it to Jon Stewart to once again be the expert voice of reason in modern media. He clearly points out in this crisis that there is the “Brian Williams Anchorman” persona, and as I pointed out previously, the “Brian Williams Storyteller” persona at public events where he appears as a celebrity speaker or guest.

At question is the brand – credibility.

At stake is reputation – damaged.

At the heart of it – two layers. A crisis for Williams the journalist and a crisis for NBC, the corporation.

I think Williams did the right thing to apologize, as mentioned in my previous blog.

NBC, in imposing a six-month suspension without pay for Brian Williams, has created a scenario in which I do think Williams can recover. In other words, I would be surprised if he ever returns to the anchor desk at NBC Nightly News ever again. I would not be surprised to see Williams announce his resignation.

Crisis management requires finesse. A crisis response too little or too late is bad. A crisis response too large makes the crisis worse and creates a series of secondary crises.

Think of crisis management the way you might think of parenting – let the punishment fit the crime. If your child leaves their bike in the driveway behind the car, a proper response is to take away their bike. Taking away every toy they own would be too extreme.

The offenses by Williams appear to have been primarily in celebrity appearances. Hence, the proper vehicle for NBC would have been to prohibit the celebrity Brian Williams from making celebrity appearances. By making such an announcement, NBC could have focused on where the sins were committed, yet opened the door for redemption by putting Williams back on the air after his self-imposed one-week suspension. This announcement should have been combined with my previous suggestion that Williams appear on the Today Show Friday with some of the soldiers who called him out. Such an appearance would have put a punctuation mark on the crisis that defines its end.

NBC, by suspending Williams for six months will remove this story from the headlines quicker. However, the harsh penalty means that if they return Williams in six months, the story will regenerate.

My opinion is that NBC News went too far.

Likely, the only way Williams could return to the anchor desk is if the veterans who called him out for his errors rallied to his side to support him, asking NBC to return him to the air very soon. My crystal ball doesn’t see that happening, although I wish it would.

Did New York City Overreact? A Crisis Communications Case Study

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junoYesterday’s crisis communications blog regarding the winter storm Juno and the #Blizzardof2015 promoted the idea of managing the expectations of those who will be affected by a crisis.

Today, some critics are saying New York City overreacted.

Two observations:

1) The people who complain about “overreacting” are idiots. These would be the same people who would criticize their leaders if things had gotten worse than predicted.

2) One way to proactively address the potential critics during your initial media statement before the storm is to use language like this:

Experts tell us this may be the worse storm we have ever faced. As a city (community) we believe the best course of action is to err on the side of caution, rather than to have anyone get hurt or put in harms way. We are putting safety measures in place based on the best information we are getting from experts at this hour. However, ultimately mother nature is in charge. Sometimes she sends us weather worse than we expected; sometimes it is not as bad as we expected. For that reason, we ask your forgiveness and understanding in advance, if we institute safeguards and ultimately those safeguards are not needed. However, at this time, the best information we have indicates that we should shut down the city…

I’ve noticed several government officials on the news already defending their position, as they should. One governor pointed out how few accidents took place in his state. New York City quickly re-opened this morning after being shut down. Meanwhile, locations in New England are getting slammed, as predicted.

As I’ve learned as a storm chaser in pursuit of hurricanes, the slightest change in tracts means the difference between safety and disaster. If the eye of the storm moves just 10 miles off of the predicted tract, it makes a huge difference.

The bottom line is communicate often and communicate forcefully. Communicate before the event, during the event, and after the event.

By Gerard Braud