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How to Use Social Media for Crisis Communications

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By Gerard Braud, CSP, Fellow IEC 

One of the best new social media tools for crisis communications is Facebook Live. Second in your crisis communications toolkit should be YouTube Live. Third would be any of the other live platforms on social media channels where your audience might follow you during a crisis. For some of you, LinkedIn Live or Periscope on Twitter are a good fit.

You should especially embrace live platforms during serious weather events and natural disasters. For example, this is being written during the first week of September 2019. Annually this is the most active week of hurricane season. Last week we saw the devastation of Hurricane Dorian. With the massive number of communities threatened, Live video would have been and should have been in the tool chest of every community, every utility company, every law enforcement agency, and many companies.

If your company, community, or organization could be affected by a hurricane this season, live video becomes a great way to manage the expectations of your audience before a crisis. Live video becomes a great crisis communications tool during the crisis, and after the event is over, you can inform your audience about how the event affected them in their relationship to you. For example, you can broadcast information about how long before roads are opened or how long before power is restored.

A perfect example would be that an electric company or any government agency could use live videos to warn their audiences about the need for disaster preparation. They could give guidelines for evacuation or precautions. Most importantly, they could use live videos to manage the expectations of which creature comforts might be lost as a result of the hurricane.

Keep in mind, this is also true all winter long when forecasters predict freezing rain, ice storms, blizzards, and other winter storms. This is also true all during tornado season.

Weather events can become crisis events.

Weather events cause a loss of creature comforts such as heating, air conditioning, refrigeration, lights, and all things utility related in a weather event.

People might not evacuate during a hurricane out of fear that they could die. However, they might evacuate – and be less of a burden to you after the storm – if you clearly inform them of how miserable they will be without lights, refrigeration, and air conditioning.

Also remember, that when the lights go out, people turn to social media for updates. Your live videos can and should be their updates.

During Tropical Storm and Hurricane Barry in July 2019, I did a number of live news videos on Facebook Live and YouTube Live so you can see examples of what you need to be prepared to do.

  • Your lighting needs to be good enough for us to see your face.
  • Your audio needs to be good to overcome wind noise.
  • Your content needs to be brief and to the point.
  • You can’t afford to mess up because you are live.
  • You get one chance to get it right, so you better practice.

My videos are often near perfect because I have lots of practice. For 15 years I was a TV reporter, doing live reports daily. Chances are I’ve been on TV live up to 5,000 times.

The real question, is how good can you be live?

If you’d like help being great when you shoot videos live and pre-recorded, check out my program called Weathering the Storm. It is a great hands-on, interactive course to help you make the most of social media and videos during 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…”

More crisis communications articles:

Please Pick Me to be Your Media Trainer

The Biggest Lie in Crisis Communications

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

Crisis Plans, Crisis Preparation, Crisis Practice & Crisis Perfections = Crisis Communications Expert

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By Gerard Braud, CSP, Fellow IEC

This is a 5-day crisis communications challenge. With only four months left in 2019, you are being challenged to focus on your crisis communications plan with crisis preparation, crisis practice, and ultimately, a focus on how you can be the expert who achieves crisis perfection.

In January 2019, you were issued a dare to participate in the five steps to effective crisis communications video course. Some of you have taken the challenge and you’ve become expert communicators. Some of you kicked the can down the road. No worries can-kickers. You can become a crisis communications expert in the four remaining months of 2019.

The dare to complete the 5-step video course still stands. I challenge you to take 10 minutes a day for five days to watch, learn, then implement the five steps. Register with this link.

In 4 months you can complete the 5 steps:

  1. A crisis vulnerability assessment
  2. Writing or updating your crisis communications plan
  3. Writing your library of pre-written crisis news releases
  4. Media training your spokespeople for crisis communications news conferences
  5. Conducting a crisis communications drill to test your plan, your spokespeople, and your team

Here is today’s tip for you to complete step 1 – your Vulnerability Assessment:

Your mind has been pre-occupied in June & July with vacation. In August your distraction is getting the kids back in school. Use September to refocus and start with either conducting a baseline Vulnerability Assessment or updating your existing Vulnerability Assessment.

In order to write a crisis communications plan and a library of pre-written news releases for when “it” hits the fan, you have to know what your “it” is.

If you’ve never done this before, open an Excel spreadsheet and start writing down every sort of situation that could become a crisis that would cause you to generate a possible crisis response.

Keep in mind that this must go beyond a list of emergency situations. While emergencies are usually something that can trigger a crisis communications plan, non-emergencies are often more likely to trigger your crisis communication plan. This includes executive misbehavior, such as sexual harassment and embezzlement.

Once you’ve written down everything you can think of, separate them by classes, such as, natural disasters, crime, environmental, labor, activists, violence, workplace injury/fatality and so on.

Now start making visits to executives, middle managers, and members of your labor force. Simply ask them what situations they see daily that could arise to the level of a crisis. Define for them that a crisis is anything that can damage the reputation and revenue of the organization.

Add their observations to your list. Sort their observation by categories.

Next, attempt to identify what the economic impact would be to the organization if each one of these things happened. Use real dollars to calculate real impact for each one of the scenarios you identify.

By the way, once a quarter you should revisit this list and this process because new events will come up that did not exist three months before.

Once your list is completed, call a meeting with executives and let them know what you have learned and share the potential financial consequences of each item on the list.

Often, this list of vulnerabilities can be reduced because leaders will speak up and offer ideas that can eliminate a potential situation or crisis. Great. Hold them accountable to eliminate or mitigate the issue. For example, if malware and fake links in emails is one of your vulnerabilities, your IT team can likely put systems in place to prevent employees from clicking on bad email links. Hence, crisis eliminated or mitigated.

For all that remain, you now need to be prepared to communicate about them in the event any of these particular issues ignites into a crisis.

Tomorrow we’ll talk about how to begin managing your communications with a crisis communications plan.

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:

Please Pick Me to be Your Media Trainer

The Biggest Lie in Crisis Communications

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

5 Steps to Effective Crisis Communications Workshop – November 7, 2019 in Baton Rouge

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If you would like to master the 5 Steps to Effective Crisis Communications, now is the time to register for the Louisiana Hospital Association’s full-day workshop on November 7, 2019 in Baton Rouge. Learn how you can be a crisis communications expert.

For full details, use this link to download the brochure.

To register, click here.

The cost is only $195 for LHA members and only $250 for corporate guests.

To hear more about what you will learn in this workshop, watch this video:

When: Thursday, November 7, 2019
10:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Where: Map this event »
LHA Conference Center
2334 Weymouth Drive
Baton Rouge, Louisiana  70809
United States

Presenter: Gerard Braud, CSP, Fellow IEC – Gerard Braud Communications


Contact: Melissa Arthur
marthur@lhaonline.org
225-928-0026

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:

Please Pick Me to be Your Media Trainer

The Biggest Lie in Crisis Communications

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

Hurricane Hack #3 by Gerard Braud

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By Gerard Braud, CSP, Fellow IEC

You may be reading this wondering, why in the world is a crisis communications expert delving out hurricane hacks? Well, I train organizations and companies to prepare for their crises with effective communications strategies before their crises. The same principle applies when it comes to facing the crisis of a hurricane. Prepare early. Prepare before the hurricane hits.

In hurricane hack #1 I talked about a refrigerator hurricane hack, then I delivered hurricane hack #2, the bathtub hack, which could really save you and your family during and after a tropical storm or hurricane. Today’s tip is a little unexpected, and involves bartering during a hurricane. View the video here:

There was a “perfect storm” when Hurricane Katrina hit, as it fell on Labor Day weekend. I evacuated to Florida, and all of the Florida stores were stocked up on beer for the Labor Day weekend. Along with all my power tools I stocked in my car to take back to Louisiana to use to repair my home, I also stocked up on beer, which was selling for dirt cheap.

Florida stores needed to get rid of it after the holiday weekend, and I brought it home knowing my hometown would be wiped out of such a commodity. Not to mention, the sale of liquor and beer is cut off after a hurricane to help prevent communities from abusing such a substance during a difficult time.

Well, the beer worked like magic. As soon as I returned home, contractors and repair men were completely swamped with work. I needed my electricity back on, my yard cleared of tree limbs, and offering the workers a simple beer got my job pushed to the top of the list. The beer came in handy in many of my negotiations over the next few days.

Beer. The ultimate hurricane hack. Buy it BEFORE the storm, so you have it after the storm. Beer is great for barter.

If you liked this hurricane hack, stay tuned for more hurricane hacks and crisis communications tips on the BraudCast YouTube channel!

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…”

Recent articles:

Please Pick Me to be Your Media Trainer

The Biggest Lie in Crisis Communications

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

Crisis Communications Planning: Q4 Use It or Lose It

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By Gerard Braud, CSP, Fellow IEC

If you operate on a fiscal budget calendar, May can be a great time for your crisis communications planning. Read more

How to Make a Strong Case for Crisis Planning to Your Boss?

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By Gerard Braud, CSP, Fellow IEC

A public relations professional reached out to me to acquire a license to my Crisis Communications Plan. The company was all set to make the purchase to use my plan. Then the CEO asked, “Why do we need a crisis communications plan? Can’t we just figure this out on the day that something happens?”

The PR team asked me, “How do we make a strong case for crisis planning with our boss?” I created an entire web page to help them make the case. It may help you.

How to Make a Strong Case for Crisis Planning to Your Boss?

1) Identify the industry you are in.

2) Identify something in that industry that has policies and standard operating procedures that are written and designed to be followed.

Make your case that just as other teams have written, standard operating procedures that need to be followed, so too must the public relations and communications team have a written set of standard operating procedures.

For example, in a chemical plant, if a specific chemical is released there are written policies and procedures that the Health, Safety, and Environmental (HSE) teams in the field and in the control room follow in order to stop the leak and recover from the situation.

Just as those teams have a policy and procedure, so should the communications team.

3) Another way to make a strong case for crisis planning with your boss is to conduct a Vulnerability Assessment. You can learn more about this in my free 5-part video series on the 5 Steps to Effective Crisis Communications, by registering here.

A Vulnerability Assessment is the first of 5 Steps to Effective Crisis Communications. Spend time with your boss and the executive leadership team listing all of the things that could go wrong in your business that would require communications with employees, the media, customers, and stakeholders.

If you define a crisis as any event that can damage your reputation and revenue, your Vulnerability Assessment should list all of those things.

Next, pick any one of those things and put a price tag on the amount of revenue a company might lose if that event happened. Take that single dollar amount, and budget it toward a Crisis Communications Plan and the entire 5 Steps to Effective Crisis Communications.

In other words, taking the steps to prepare on a clear sunny day for the crisis that might befall you on your darkest day should more than pay for itself.

One final note: Your boss might simply say, “Why don’t you do this? Why do we need to hire someone else? That’s what we pay you for.”

Your answer should begin with an outline of how much time it takes to write a crisis communications plan and a library of pre-written news releases. The plan that I license to clients along with more than 100 news pre-written news releases took me 4,000 hours to perfect. To break that down in a 40-hour work week, it would take you 100 weeks – two years of work – to do it on your own.

So the response to your boss should be, “Sure, we can do that. Would you like me to put everything else on hold for two years to complete this, would you like me to hire a new employee for two years to do this, or would you like me to call Gerard Braud and we can have this done in two days?” (Shameless plug)

How to Make a Strong Case for Crisis Planning to Your Boss? Look at the dollars and cents in order to make sense.

 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:

Please Pick Me to be Your Media Trainer

The Biggest Lie in Crisis Communications

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

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Crisis Communications: Mayday! Mayday! Help Me! Help Me!

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By Gerard Braud, CSP, Fellow IEC

In the world of crisis communications, May should be a pivotal time for crisis communications plans, spokesperson media training, crisis drills, and vulnerability assessments.

Why?

The phrase “Mayday, Mayday” is the international distress call.

Mayday got its start as an international distress call in 1923. Reportedly, it was the idea of Frederick Mockford, who was a senior radio officer in London. The phrase was selected in part because it sounded like the French word “m’aider,” which means “help me.”

May isn’t an official time for crisis communications planning and preparations, but we can start. Mayday! Mayday! Help Me! Help Me!

Need help?

There are five steps to effective crisis communications. In January I issued a dare to all of my followers to spread those five steps out over the year. (If you want a deeper dive on the five steps, sign up for my free five part video series on The Five Steps to Effective Crisis Communications.)

The 5 Steps To Effective Crisis Communications Include:

  1. Conducting an initial Vulnerability Assessment
  2. Writing your Crisis Communications Plan
  3. Writing a library of pre-written news releases
  4. Conducting annual media training for your spokespeople
  5. Conducting an annual crisis communications drill

Many people have taken the challenge and moved forward. I’m thrilled at the response.

Not surprisingly, many have done nothing. As predicted when I issued the challenge in January, many people get trapped in a winter funk and delay decisions and actions until spring.

Spring has sprung. Get to work if you haven’t done so yet. But, pretty soon, people will disappear for summer vacation and projects, training, and decisions will get once again get delayed.

Mayday! Mayday! Help Me! Help Me!

No one can rescue you if you keep waiting for the most perfect time to take the first step or the next step in your crisis communications planning. Just as a disaster or crisis doesn’t wait for the most perfect time, neither should you wait for the most perfect time.

Be a leader and lead. If you are a good leader, others will want to follow. Pick a step; pick a date; invite people to participate.

If you feel the need to shout “Mayday! Mayday! Help Me! Help Me!” do it. I’m standing by to answer your distress call.

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:

Please Pick Me to be Your Media Trainer

The Biggest Lie in Crisis Communications

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

The PIO and the Right to Know: 2nd Annual Communications Summit

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By Gerard Braud, CSP, Fellow IEC

I’m thrilled to be the opening keynote speaker for the 2nd Annual PIO and the Right to Know Communications Summit at Wayne State University in Detroit. 

Crisis communications and crisis communications planning is hard work. We’ll tackle every aspect of it.

To help attendees, this page serves as a resource page for my presentation called:

When “It” Hits the Fan

Download your handouts here:

Download a PDF of my slides here https://braudcommunications.com/pdf/2019-PIO.pdf

Connect on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/gerardbraud/

Connect on Twitter @gbraud

Facebook https://www.facebook.com/BraudCommunications/

Website https://braudcommunications.com/

Email Gerard@BraudCommunications.com

To learn more about the 5 Steps to Effective Crisis Communications, click here. You will receive five 10-minute videos that go more in-depth on each of the five 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:

Please Pick Me to be Your Media Trainer

The Biggest Lie in Crisis Communications

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

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MIC of Colorado 2019: We Have a Situation

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It is great to be in Denver to speak to the Meetings Industry Council of Colorado. Like all other businesses, the meetings industry is finding it is vulnerable to having a serious crisis at a conference, convention, or event. For the sake of discussion, we will define a crisis as any situation that escalates to the point at which it can damage an organization’s reputation and revenue. Read more

Is the NFL Brand in Crisis With Their Customer?

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By Gerard Braud, CSP, Fellow IEC


Please share your opinion. Is the NFL brand in crisis with their customers? Share your answers either here on this blog, watch the video here and comment on The BraudCast YouTube Channel, or Tweet your thoughts to us @gbraud.

In the past two weeks we’ve seen a variety of controversies and issues:

1) The no-call double penalty against my beloved New Orleans Saints during the NFC playoff game.

2) Potential halftime performers were chased away by people who thought performing was an affront to Collin Kaepernick.

3) Those who did perform were criticized by those who support Collin Kaepernick.

4) Roger Goodell failed to talk to the media about the blown call in the Saints game until he was forced to at the pre-Super Bowl news conference.

5) Fans were critical of the game score and lack of excitement.

6) Fans were critical of the halftime show.

7) Fans were critical of the ads.

8) Saints fans boycotted watching television to affect the ratings, while attending their own Boycott Bowl parties.

9) Roger Goodell was booed by fans during the Super Bowl trophy presentation.

So, is the NFL facing a crisis? Is the NFL brand in crisis? Is the NFL facing customer volatility and failing to recognize the potential damage to their reputation and revenue?

Tell us what you think.

 

 

This question is one of a series of debates in the media relations, crisis communications, public relations, and social media industries where you and your colleagues can share observations with each other. Yes, YOU are invited to share your bite size bits of best practices. Here is how:

Step 1: Subscribe to The BraudCast on YouTube

Step 2: You will see a short video that poses a new question every Monday. You then post your best practices and observations on The BraudCast YouTube channel.

3: Once your opinion is shared, you can follow the discussion online so you can compare your best practices to those of your professional colleagues.

Step 4: Watch the Follow up Friday Video where you will see a short YouTube video outlining some of the most interesting observations. Yes…your comments may actually show up on our BraudCast video, bringing you world-wide fame, fortune, a big raise, glory, street parades, and more.

Thanks in advance for sharing your knowledge. Please take 2 seconds now to subscribe to The BraudCast.