Welcome to The Chemical Show, the podcast where Chemical means business.
I'm your host, Victoria Meyer, bringing you stories and insights
from leaders driving innovation and growth across the chemical industry.
Each week we explore key trends, real world challenges, and the
strategies that make an impact.
Let's get started.
Victoria: Chemicals means business.
So today I get have the opportunity to speak with Gerard Braud who is
a crisis communications expert.
Um, if, if you've been in the chemical industry for a while and
really almost industry, you know, that there's a variety of incidents
that have been in the news and often company response could be better.
And you know, I'd like to tell people, you either control the
narrative and control the story, or somebody is gonna make it up for you.
And in the case of the chemical industry in particular, as we, you
know, as you guys know, within my target audience here, Knowing that story,
telling our story is really critical.
So I am excited to have Gerard Braud back on The Chemical Show here to
talk about crisis communications.
He was first on the Chemical Show.
Boy back in our early days, I'm gonna link to that episode because
I'm sure there's still something for you to learn from that.
Um, we're gonna kind of have a refresh conversation talking
about how chemical companies and leaders can be ready to respond.
So Gerard welcome to the Chemical Show.
Gerard: Hey, it's good to be back.
Nice to talk with you again.
Victoria: Absolutely.
So let's just start with a little bit about you.
What is your origin story?
How did you get interest interested in this field of crisis communications?
Gerard: Yeah.
My first career was actually as a TV journalist.
I did a little newspaper, but mostly 15 years in tv.
And the last 10 of those I was covering.
Mainly environmental issues.
And I was working first, uh, in Baton Rouge, then in New Orleans.
So I had this massive industrial corridor between Baton Rouge and
the mouth of the Mississippi River.
So I was covering environmental issues, pollution issues, but of course I
was also the first one on the scene.
Every time there was a fire and explosion release.
I have to deal with community activists, I have to deal with.
All of the various protests that would happen.
Greenpeace did a massive campaign down the Mississippi River when I was a reporter,
and as I did my news reports every day I would see people say things to me that
they should never say to anyone, things they wouldn't say to their competitors.
They would say to me, holding the microphone with a TV camera, recording
them and putting them on the air.
And I didn't, oh my gosh.
Didn't do it be mean or anything.
I just did it because that was my job.
I'm telling the story.
I ask a question, they answer it poorly.
So I started taking notes about how people did.
Interviews so poorly and I started building a curriculum for media training.
And when I left television, I was doing a lot of media training and as
I would do the media training, my, my chemical clients needed it to be
crisis communications media training.
Mm-hmm.
They weren't cutting ribbons or, or doing some happy Pappy PR news.
They needed crisis communications.
And as I started doing that, I started inventing new ways
to help them to be better.
So many people in media training teach a spokesperson how to have three key
messages, and your first key message is safety is our top priority and our
second key message, or our employees are our greatest asset, and our third.
Key messages we give to the United Way, and then there's fire and explosion and
they stand in front of a burning chemical plant and say, safety is our top priority.
And I'm sitting there going, clearly not sparky, because
I see flames over your head.
And well, employees are our, our greatest asset.
Well.
Clearly not the ones who are dead today.
And it was just it.
It was comical to me and my real cynic and it was just comical
how badly interviews went.
So I left tv, started doing media training that went into writing crisis
communications plans, and then I started building a a net a, a whole bunch of
Word documents that were pre-written news releases so that we could get
people faster in crisis communications.
It's really about what you do on a clear, sunny day.
To prepare for your worst day.
That means not just all the safety stuff that you do, it has to
be the communications with your employees, with the media, with your
community, and what has happened.
Now, we're coming 20th anniversary of Facebook being launched
and companies still don't move at the speed of social media.
So my goal has been to build systems and to do training for the chemical industry.
Uh, so that.
They're, they're able to get a statement out in three to five minutes
instead of three to five hours.
Wow.
I'm constantly fighting this three to five hour.
It just gets me so mad every time there's a big fire and explosion
somewhere to watch three to five hours go by before a statement comes out.
Yeah.
So that's, that's my origin story to where I am today as the evangelist to
prepare and to get statements out fast.
Victoria: Absolutely.
And that obviously led you to launching Situation Hub.
Gerard: Yeah, situation Hub is a software company.
I still consider it in startup phase, but I'm now in my fifth we launched
during covid, and what Situation Hub does I always see certain problems
and I'll go through 'em real fast, and I wanted to fix these problems, so.
The crisis happens and there's a lack of information.
You know, somebody may be able to call into command center with a radio, but
too many organizations still rely on a calling tree, and if you've ever
been on a calling tree, you repeat yourself 10 times to 10 people, and
that slows the flow of information.
Additionally, the communications team, if there is one, and the big companies
have communications teams, the small wins have to have somebody else do it.
But.
The information to the communications team doesn't get to them in time.
And then when it does get to them, they have to write a news release.
And then after they spend 30 to 45 minutes writing the news release, they take it
into a bunch of non-writers, engineers, and they say, what do you think?
And those people tear it they fight over commas.
They send it back for a second draft.
Second draft comes, they go through a little bit more revision.
The third draft goes out in three and a half hours pass, and what
I invented with Situation Hub is.
Log into a software system, pick what your event is.
If it's a fire, choose fire.
If it's a spill, choose spill.
If a truck accident, choose truck accident.
Workplace injury.
Choose workplace injury.
It feeds you questions.
It's, it's all about the brilliant prompts that we wrote for it.
And as you answer the questions, it is simultaneously writing the news release.
Once you finish answering the questions, there's a little
button that says, alert team.
And that pushes a blast out to a dozen of your critical.
Crisis communications team members and brings them all
to a virtual situation room.
So now everybody in seconds, minutes has situational awareness.
So from the flash point until you answer the questions is.
Three to five minutes, depending on, that's amazing how critical your vent is.
And the number of fatalities hit that button that says Alert Team.
Everyone has instant access.
You read for correctness.
Nothing is written in prose.
Forget what your English teacher taught you.
That's not what Situation Hub is.
Situation, hubs, writing like a journalist, and it's just facts.
Just facts.
No nuance, no opinion, no putting lipstick on the pig, as I like to say.
It covers.
Who, what, when, where, why, and how.
Without speculation, it provides proper empathy.
And if it's all true, one button puts it on the internet.
So now you can share that statement with the media, with your employees, with
your community, and other stakeholders.
So that has been my passion project and I actually invented it in my head 20 years
ago, but I didn't build it initially because connectivity wasn't good enough.
Now with cell phones and connectivity.
There's almost no place you can go where you're not getting some sort of a signal.
So Situation Hub is, you know, ideal on a nice computer screen, but it works
well on your phone, works well anywhere.
And instead of carrying here, I've, I've got one of my old
crisis communications plans here.
My gosh, that's what I, my right, that was a hundred pre-written news releases.
That's a ream and a half paper.
So instead of.
Carrying all of that around, I can give you a 26 page crisis
communications plan and instructions on how to use Situation Hub.
And anybody anywhere in the world can be doing crisis communications
at the speed of social media.
That first statement will be out in five minutes or less if you practice
and do it right, and then you can have a second statement with more details.
Within one hour.
So that's my passion.
Wow, that's
Victoria: really cool.
So, I mean, that's really amazing and I think just the journey and of where
you've been since, even since we talked the first time is pretty awesome.
gonna dial us back a little bit.
So you focus on helping companies with crisis communications, like
what actually is a crisis or a crisis communication situation?
When does it apply?
Gerard: So the best way to define it is, is it something that will damage the
company's revenue, reputation, and brand revenue First, reputation and brand.
So, I'm in the public relations field and so many people in public relations
preach reputation management, and that's why managers see PR as a soft skill.
You have to connect the dots and realize that if your reputation is
damaged, it's gonna damage your revenue.
Uh, at this point in time, uh, I'll take a risk at looking at a small controversy
that's in the news every day, right?
So, uh, we are what years?
This is 2025, and Donald Trump is president of the United States.
That's this moment in time, and Elon Musk is helping him,
and as Elon Musk does things.
Government.
He's hurting his brand.
He's doing reputation damage, but as he does reputation damage,
because of his political views, he's doing revenue damage.
His stock is down 40, 50%.
That's a crisis.
That's a corporate crisis for a chemical person, it could be the fire,
it could be the spill, it could be.
An, an accident, a workplace injury, fatality, any of those
day-to-day things that could happen.
But it can also be every sort of natural disaster.
It can be weather, events, hurricanes, freezes.
Uh, we constantly see along the, the Gulf Coast and the Atlantic Coast that
hurricanes come in and damage facilities.
Causing releases.
yeah, all of that stuff can be a crisis.
You also have your, what I would call your executive white collar type crisis bribes.
That on that sexual harassment.
But you can also have cyber events.
If you get cyber attack, that's a crisis.
If you have social media blow up in your face, sometimes you post something
you think is pleasant on social media and it creates a social media backlash.
So all of these things can be considered a crisis Like one of my chemical
companies using Situation Hub logs in there are more than 80 different
templates that they can choose and, and if you go to situation hub.com
and go to the chemical page, at the very bottom, you'll see little tabs
with all of the very different.
Things that could be a crisis.
And that's just a perfect to do a hit list for yourself and see, geez, how
many of these things could happen to me?
How do we communicate quickly, uh, for
Victoria: so I think that's super helpful and you've gone
through some of the scenarios.
So, uh, I'm gonna jump to, you know, two of the things that
I personally see happening.
may be hamper communications.
In fact, it's, it's crisis communications, it's non-crisis communications.
It's just communications of all varieties across companies, chemical
companies, and other companies.
Is, um, first of all.
Incomplete information and this belief or desire that if I just wait
a little bit longer, I have more information and it's gonna be better.
then the second piece is this view of I can't communicate
because I need to protect someone.
Someone is someone or a company, or somebody's confidentiality and privacy.
How do you respond to that?
Gerard: First of all, you don't need to know everything to say something,
saying something has happened and we don't know all the details, but
when we know the details, we'll get them to you is a good statement.
In public relations during a crisis, you should put out something
that's called a holding statement.
I, in Situation Hub, it's listed as a one first critical statement.
It's the first template that shows up on the list of 80 vets.
It generates something that's going to be about 10 to 15 sentences long
that says what the event is, what time did it happen, where did it it.
It won't speculate on the cause.
There'll be a specific sentence that says, members of the team
are still gathering information.
When we know more, we'll pass it along to you.
It'll cover whether anybody's dead, whether anybody's injured,
whether anybody's missing.
If necessary, it'll have an empathy statement to admonish
the media not to believe.
Everything you see on social media, it'll promise to do an update and it
promises to give more information and.
When this statement goes it reads 15 sentences are gonna be approximately
90 seconds in reading time.
This is something, you know, if you're an old TV guy, 15
sentences sentence 90 seconds.
So with 90 seconds of information given to the media, that gives
them 90 seconds of facts.
To say on the air rather than speculating.
When I used to show up at chemical plants and there was no spokesperson.
We'd started doing live shots immediately.
I lived next to a chemical plant when I grew up.
My dad works at the chemical plant.
I put myself through college at the chemical plant.
I can speculate a better, a little better than most of the other
reporters, but I was still forced to speculate until someone gave me facts.
By giving a holding statement, a first critical statement, you end the drama.
Of the speculation and they'll repeat it over and over again
because you gave them that.
And then with Situation Hub, you can go back into the app, you
create second statement that's going to have more details.
And so you don't have to know everything.
But by the time you start creating that second statement, let's say 20,
30 minutes has passed, you know a lot more now regarding privacy issues,
in my app it is built to where.
It covers.
Fatality, uh, injuries missing people, and it's built for mass casualty.
You can kill more than 20, you can injure more than 20.
You can have more than 20 missing in this news release, but it always gives you the
option to either give their name or not give their name, to give their age or not
give their name to say what their injuries are and not say what their injuries are
to say what hospital they're going to.
So you're able to not violate hipaa.
And I think the world became more sensitive to HIPAA during covid
when, the, the internal lawyers all said, you can't say Bob has covid.
That's a violation of of hipaa.
You can only say Bob's not at work today.
So the privacy issues are all addressed in my software platform,
certainly, and if there are still executives who think that's a problem.
They need to address it on a clear, sunny day and not battle it out in the crisis
command center on the day of the crisis.
Victoria: Yeah.
Gerard: So much about what you do before the event happens and, and you were
asking what crisis communications is.
You know, crisis communications comes in two forms.
If an organization does something bad and they try to cover it up and then the
story gets uncovered by a whistleblower
Victoria: or
Gerard: by an investigative reporter, then you have to try to.
Put what I call lipstick on the pig.
It's an ugly pig putting lipstick on.
It doesn't make it any uglier, and you have to do so much more work
to repair the revenue, reputation, and, and brand on the back end.
My specialty, even though I do some of that stuff, in fact,
I've got three clients right now.
It's just like this year has been crazy with people wanting me to fix the broken.
What I don't really specialize in is keeping it from ever breaking.
Don't let the crisis happen.
And if the crisis does happen, hey, guess what?
We've got 80 plus news releases ready to communicate in three to five minutes
so that you get ahead of the story.
And, and one other thing that's happening is when companies use these scripts.
Traditionally a reporter would show up.
I know I always did that.
If nobody's talking to me, I go knock on the trailer near chemical plant
and I interview whoever comes out.
So Bubba comes out in his t-shirt and his overalls and I ask what happens?
And he says, well, I saw the plant and blow it up real good.
And that actually happened to me.
I actually have a soundbite of guys saying it blow up real good.
I used it a lot of my, my training classes.
But then I'm talking to somebody who doesn't have the facts.
Victoria: Yeah.
Now, Bubba
Gerard: today is on social media, right, Bubba?
I don't even have to go knock on the door.
with Situation Hub, what I'm doing now is I'm producing a script
and I'm training people to read scripts in media training class.
When they read those scripts, we're getting 50 to 75%.
Of what our spokespeople say, ending up word for word in the final news story,
and they're quoting our spokespeople four and five times on camera.
Therefore, they run out of time and they don't have time to go find Bubba.
And if a TV story is 90 seconds long, and I've produced a 92nd script.
Situation hub.
Hey, guess what?
I just wrote the reporter story.
Victoria: Mm-hmm.
And you and
Gerard: I were talking, uh, previously about reporters today
are often very young veterans.
People like me aren't in the business anymore.
They weren't paying us to stay in the business and we went elsewhere.
But when these young reporters come in, they have no background on chemicals.
They just think all chemicals are bad.
They don't realize how many chemicals were in that, that the microphone
they're the cell phone, they're holding all of the equipment they
use their closed, their automobile.
People are ignorant when it comes to what our chemicals.
What are their good uses?
They immediately go to the fear of what chemicals are.
So many reporters doing stories in the chemical industry or ill-informed.
And then you and I were also discussing how some of them are
just flat, lazy, and they want you to do your homework for them.
Well, guess what kids?
I did your homework.
I wrote the term paper.
It's called a news release.
Here it is.
And now they're using 50 to 75% of everything We give 'em
word for word when we do it.
Victoria: Yeah.
Gerard: So in the big picture that brings all of those pieces together.
Victoria: It's pretty amazing.
And as you noted, we were talking about this, I mean, I've been
in a couple of articles recently and, um, quite liberally quoted.
But again, if, if you give somebody.
Good, coherent, solid information, they're gonna use it.
Then they don't have to create it.
'cause Yeah.
You know, ideally a reporter should not be a creative writer.
They should be a reporter.
And that's, you know, ultimately in times of crisis, uh, and even non-crisis.
We want accuracy in our reporting.
Absolutely.
What about Absolutely.
So, so Gerard the other thing I see happening, maybe just inhibits
the whole time aspect of it.
and certainly I could see where this is true with smaller companies
is not knowing, you know, kind of the who's on first who gets to make
that, you know, approve the press release, approve the statement, you
having that person ready to speak.
see that happening a lot or has that been sorted out?
Gerard: No, it's never sorted out because most people don't They, they wing it,
and when you wing it, you crash and burn.
So a crisis communications plan is something that you write on
a clear, sunny day that outlines everything that's gonna happen from
flashpoint to end of the news cycle.
Now sometimes that news cycle is three or four hours, sometimes
it's 12 hours, sometimes it's 24.
Sometimes it stays and it's weeks depending on what it is, and there
is a cadence that you have to follow.
But you also have to who's gonna gather the information about the crisis?
Who's gonna share it?
How do you bring the team together?
What's the approval Who are your spokespeople?
Because in the early moments of the crisis, I can't send
a subject matter expert out.
I need to send a PR person out to read the first statement because my main managers.
Need to be managing the incident, not managing the media.
You know, I always said that about Tony Hayward in the BP crisis, Tony
Hayward should have been managing the business and, and the, the crisis of
the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Instead of being on camera every day trying to manage the media
where he royally screwed up, lost his job, damage to the revenue,
reputation, and grants even more so.
Picking spokespeople means you need to have bench strength.
You need to know when to send out a public relations spokesperson,
when to send out someone from operations, subject matter expert.
Many companies think only the CEO should speak and that we speak with
one voice, and it's my deep voice because I'm the CEO and I'm old.
Victoria: Yeah,
Gerard: and no, that's not true because.
If that person messes up, who cleans up their mistake, and I usually,
I, I long ago realized that the CEO comes out for something that is
not a super high level crisis, then it makes the crisis appear bigger.
But if there is empathy to be conveyed, that's when you bring
out the big cheese, the CEO Got it.
Uh, prior to that, a subject matter expert works.
So you've gotta have multiple people.
That you can turn to that have all been trained.
It doesn't come easy.
Talking to the media is like no other interview you will ever do,
and, and the questions are what?
Kill people, right?
Yeah.
You can come out and make a statement, but it's your questions where you say
one wrong word and everything goes bad.
What I built into situation hub was sentences that are bulletproof and
sentences in a statement that answer questions before they get asked.
Yeah.
So for example, uh, a news release might say, we can confirm there is one fatality.
Okay?
If you say that, you'll be asked, who is it?
Or you're given their name,
Victoria: or the
Gerard: employee, contractor, visitor, what was their age?
If my news release and situation hub says, we can confirm there is one
fatality, however, we're not able to release any additional information until
the next of can have been notified.
That extra second half of the sentence takes away three
Victoria: Yeah.
So one of the things in here, okay, as A non reporter, I was gonna say a non-media
person, and yet I consider myself a media person at this point with my podcast in
the, the media business I'm building.
Right?
Um, but as a non reporter, I.
I, you know, just a lay person when it comes to many of the news
releases, the articles and stuff.
I gotta be honest, I mean, like when they say company spokesperson, blah, blah,
blah, said, oh heck, they said nothing.
Let's move along.
I'm actually, personally, I'm often quite disappointed now in the immediate.
In the immediate moment.
You know what?
Yeah, absolutely.
There was an incident.
we are addressing it.
We can confirm that there was an incident that that immediate confirmation.
Great.
But when three hours or six hours or 24 hours has gone on and it's still
well, company spokesperson, I'm like,
Gerard: so, so one of the problem, I'm disappointed it's a reputation
Victoria: issue at that point.
For me,
Gerard: it's, it's a public relations issue.
Right.
Okay.
Because it happens, it happens in PR school, in college where they teach
you the old method of writing a news release uh, always calls for a quote.
From a high level executive, that's complete bs.
You don't have to track him down and, and everybody writes these made up quotes, and
then it kills more time getting the guy to say, can, can we say that you said this?
Then he's gonna rewrite what?
They said, he said that he now wants to say differently.
Right.
And it just eats up time and, and when I first rolled out Situation
Hub, that was actually one of the things I got from PR people was,
well, there's no quote in here.
Every sentence is quotable.
And now that we're seeing companies use situation have been a crisis
and they're pulling four and five soundbites, not only are they're
pulling four and five soundbites that the person read from the script.
They were pulling the same soundbites from TV station to TV station to TV
station, and that was always because I know there are certain catnip sort of
phrases that I put it in the statement.
I promise the reporter will use it because as a reporter I was
trained to interview people.
Look for great quotes.
Once I have a quote, I have to build a series of sentences to get
me to that quote, and then I have to build a series of sentences
to transition out of that quote.
So what I'm doing in my script is all of the transitions are built
in, all of the quotes are built in.
You don't have to have quotation marks, a comma in Bob Smith's
name for it to be quoted.
They're going to quote a company spokesperson said, or the company
said, just very generically.
Yeah.
The company said they would conduct an investigation to find out what
happened, how it happened, and how we keep it from happening again.
Mm.
That gets quoted every time.
Victoria: I know another
Gerard: statement that gets quoted every time is we'd like to thank the
responders and members of the community.
Yeah.
All of my thank you statements get quoted every time.
Victoria: Yeah, and,
Gerard: and there are so many, there are so many catnip nuggets.
That I've built in, it eliminates what you see.
And I'm glad you've seen this.
I'm glad you've called this out.
It is stupid.
It is insane when time is of the essence and revenue, reputation,
and brand are on the line.
Why would you waste time getting BS that no one believes Anyway?
And the other thing I want you to notice is, is as all of us go forward,
everybody listening to this show and watching this program take a shot.
Every morning when you hear someone say, safety is our top priority.
I'm so tired of the phrase, safety is our top priority,
or we're committed to safety.
It's not true.
'cause if you were, y'all wouldn't be having the problem today.
Y'all wouldn't be on the CBS evening news and the NBC nightly news and all the other
Victoria: Yeah, I, I'm with you on that.
I, um, I worked for Shelf for a very long time.
A big part of my career and great company.
But it got to be where, well, you know, well, let's start with safety.
Let's start with our results.
when it is a platitude.
It becomes a bit meaningless.
And I think that is, that's the message that needs to be.
It is important.
We want everyone to go home safely from work every day, be present safely.
Go home safely.
Absolutely.
No doubt about it, but it's used in such a platitude kind of a
way that it loses its power.
it loses power.
So, so Gerard this has been really good and, You know, if you were gonna
leave people with one message for, you communications, what would it be?
Gerard: We live in the age of social media.
If you are not getting a statement out in under 15 minutes,
you're doing it all wrong.
And I would say that if you're not doing what needs to be done on a clear,
sunny day to be your best on your worst day, then you are missing the boat.
Chemicals can be handled safely every day.
They're used by consumers every day, but on the day when
something goes wrong, no matter.
What your safety culture is, it's that thing that goes wrong, that's often
beyond your control that creates a crisis.
That damages your revenue, reputation, and brand, and I wanna make sure
that doesn't happen for you.
So Awesome.
It's all about preparation and having the right tools in
Victoria: Cool.
That's great.
Gerard thank you so much for joining me today on the Chemical Show.
Good seeing you.
Take care.
Absolutely, and thanks everyone else for joining us.
Keep listening, keep following, keep sharing, and we will
talk with you again soon.
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