A crisis has hit your organization. How exactly do you respond? How do you communicate to the world, your stakeholders, your customers? It's crisis communication style. Hi, I'm TJ Walker. This video is going to walk you through all the fundamentals you need to know about crisis communications, exactly what it is how to respond, how to go about the process of communicating effectively to the world during a time of crisis for your organization.

So for starters, let's talk about what is a crisis a crisis is something that's happened. That is considered of such importance that it could ruin your reputation, your organization's reputation. It's something that could cause damage to you, not just for one day or a minor little blip, but something that could stain your reputation so that you might lose customers. Investors might shy away, the public might turn against you, regulators might turn against you. It's that sort of thing you need to be prepared for it can happen to any organization, a big oil company or a one person consultancy. So everyone needs to be prepared for a crisis at some point and specifically how to communicate it to the world.

By the way, if you want even more information on how to communicate effectively to the news media during a crisis, at absolutely no charge to you, you can get a free online media training course by clicking on the link below or by going to media training worldwide comm and signing up for the free media training course which will help you prepare for media interviews, press conferences, during a time of crisis. So back to what is actual crisis and why it's so important. Well for example, BP The huge international oil concern did not respond very well to its crisis when it had the leak in the Gulf. And because of poor communication, because of consistent bad press conferences by their CEO, their market capitalization lost $30 billion. So when people tell you why does it really matter, no one pays attention wrong $30 billion. Volkswagen had a major crisis in its reputation when it was revealed that it was cheating on emission standards.

Its market capitalization went down $30 billion 30% of its overall market cap, vaporized in just a short period of time. So, folks, that is why it is important to have a plan for when crisis happens. Nobody's perfect. No organization is perfect. No one can control all events at all times. But you can control how you respond to crisis and that is what's essential about crisis communications.

For starters, there's the timing. Now, many decades ago, when Tylenol had its scandal, it got all sorts of praise for how it reacted to the the contamination of its Tylenol products that people don't realize today, it took them 24 hours to ever respond to the news media. But it was a slower time. New cycles were much slower back then right now, it's instant. If there's a crisis that affects your organization, people are talking about it in Twitter, on Facebook, every other social media platform. So you've got to respond instantly and if not instantly, certainly within the hour.

So so much of crisis communication has to do with not coming up with the perfect answer that everyone has studied and thought about and reflected upon for three weeks. But what is the best answer you can come up with right now for reporters and the public wanting to know what is happening right now. You have to have a nimbleness to you if you're going to be effective otherwise, all of your detractors are going to define you, your enemies are going to detract you are going to attack you, and to try to detract from your overall reputation and image. Other people will define you if there's a crisis that affects your organization, there's going to be a vacuum and everyone is going to weigh in, you had better be the leading voice talking about what you and your organization are doing. So for starters, when a crisis happens, it's critical that you very quickly establish what are the facts as you know them.

Then, what is it that you are actively doing to make the situation better? And of course, if anyone has been killed, injured harm, it's important to express sympathy for those people not necessarily blame or culpability, but sympathy for those people. And some condolences if appropriate, and what you're doing for them. So too often, when there's a crisis, people hunker down, they get a bunker mentality and their attorney seldom don't say anything. Don't say anything. And hide from the media.

Absolute worst possible response. When you hide, you are looking guilty. People will assume you're guilty, guilty people high. Innocent people are transparent, and they answer questions. So when a crisis hits your organization, for starters, you've got to figure out what are the three things that you want the public to know? What happened?

What are you doing to make the situation better? Are you investigating? Have you shut down a plant? Have you evacuated the area, you can always talk in a positive, proactive way about what you are doing. Now, there are many times when you simply don't know. And the only thing you can do is let people know, you have alerted the local fire department, state regulators, federal officials who regulate what it is you do.

But it's important that people see you that they see you're accountable, that you're answering questions that you're not hiding. Quite often that is more important than getting a perfect, perfect, perfect message. Now you don't want bad messages. But you do want people to know that you're there, your front, your center, you're accountable. And you will answer all questions. So when you're coming up with your messages, you really, really need to have something short, simple, focused, that is the best you can do.

Right now there's an explosion at your factory at 9am. And it's now 9:45am. You don't have to know every fact you don't have to speculate on the cause you don't have to talk about how this will affect your stock price. That would be the worst thing to do, then, instead, stick to exactly what has happened. What you are doing at 45 minutes into the crisis, the main focus may be evacuating the town, how people can get out of town quickly and all the authorities you have notified and other safety precautions. It's two weeks later, you're going to have a completely different message.

What's consistent though, is that you someone from your organization, if you're a big publicly traded company, it had better be your CEO is on the ground. being accessible, answering reporters questions, and letting the public know exactly what's going on. It's the secrecy that gets us into trouble. Because people not only can assume the worst, they will assume the worst. So it's critical that you very quickly come up with a message. By all means, listen to your lawyers.

Don't let lawyers completely decide your communication strategy. Let's put it this way. Anyone who lets their lawyers define their public relations strategy, in my view, is as smart as someone who is in front of a judge and jury on murder charges and decides to let their PR person lead their legal case and represent them in a court of law. Obviously, you would consider that person a fool. Similarly, anyone who lets their lawyers define their messaging and My view is equally a full lawyers have been trained to understand the law and to keep you out of prison. By all means, listen to your lawyers during a time of crisis.

You don't want to say something that is going to set you up for a lawsuit or penalty penalties that will put you in prison or bankrupt your company. But remember this lawyers are trained to mitigate risk to use a favorite legal term mitigate. They want to lessen your risk, your legal risk. So if you just say no comment, and the lawyers worldview quite often, hey, that's minimizing risk. I didn't say anything that will come back to haunt me in a court of law. But there's another court you have to worry about the court of public opinion.

So corporations that exclusively follow the dictates of their lawyers quite often. themselves in a situation where they've got no legal problems, but the public, their customers, their clients have such a low opinion of them that nobody wants to do business with them, their revenues fall to zero and they'd gone bankrupt. The lawyer could say, hey, did my job kept you out of prison? Well, what good does that do? If you're out of business, so is the main spokesperson for a company? a CEO, if you're a large public company, your job is to certainly take into consideration the legal concerns.

But you have to look at the big picture and the big picture is all of your stakeholders. It's not just the legal system. It is the public, regulators, customers, clients, investors, your own employees. You have to take into consideration the immediate It concerns of all of those people, and you have to address them, you have to make them feel better about the situation, you have to make them feel that, okay, it's not a great situation. But these people are trying to do the best they can. They're trying to be transparent.

They're not hiding anything. And they're trying to make things better. That's really what's important for all of your communications at varying stages of a crisis, whether it's 10 minutes into a crisis, or a day in or two months in, you have to convey to the public and the media, that you're not hiding anything, that you're trying to give people information as quickly as possible, as accurately as possible, that you're trying to make the situation better, that you're not doing anything for short term gain and that you Want to make amends? This doesn't mean you have to admit to liability and set your up yourself up for multibillion dollar lawsuits to put you out of business. But that is what you need to convey at every interview. And every press conference, you're accessible, you're not hiding anything.

Here's everything we know right now that we can tell you. Here's what we're doing to make things better. Here's what we're going to do here, other people were reaching out to, to help this situation. Those are the themes you need to address in your message. And you need to figure out how to get that app in the first minute, ideally in the first 30 seconds now, how often should you communicate during a crisis. The more you communicate, the better.

The days are gone. When a Tylenol situation can hit and you have 24 hours to respond these days. If a major company did that business, they would be out of business, it would be over for them. So you certainly need to have some statement out within the hour. Ideally, less than that. If it's a huge, huge crisis, and TV crews are there and there's anything visible source of a fire explosion, that destruction injuries, you should be available and accessible, ideally, at least once an hour, and even more.

So. Here's the challenge for people is it's human nature to want to get something new. Well, you might not know anything new for the next six hours or eight hours. And the key is don't guess where people get themselves into trouble during a crisis is they want to be helpful. They want to be positive. They want to be optimistic.

So Mr. Walker, will the fire be out in three hours? I think so. I hope so. Yes, the fire We'll be out in three hours. Well, what happens if it's three and a half hours from now and that fire is still blazing? Well, this TV reporter can do a split screen.

Here's Walker saying three hour three and a half hours ago, the fire will definitely be out in three hours. And here's the other side of the screen with this roaring fire. raging fire. So now, what does everyone know with 100% certainty? This Walker guy is a big liar. That's what people know.

He's not to be trusted. His assurances are absolutely worthless. So be very, very careful with that. Do not guess about the future. Don't be optimistic. Focus on what you know, this is what gets people into trouble.

You saw this. In the BP Gulf scandal where predictions were made about a little would come out and When the hole would be plugged, don't guess. Because if you guess and you guess, right you don't get a lot of credit. If you guess and you guessed wrong, you get a tremendous amount of blame, misery and all sorts of negative things happen so don't get stick to the facts. And if someone says to terrorism call this was terrorism behind this don't say well it's possible we haven't ruled anything out yet. That's the worst possible thing because now the headline on all the newscast possible terrorism at the walker industry plant.

That's not a good thing. Why cause more panic. Don't buy into the hypothetical of reporters. If you don't know something, simply say, we don't know the cause right now. 100% of our efforts are focused Just on putting out the fire. Now, did I dodge the question about possible terrorism links?

No. I didn't dodge the question. I didn't simply use the reporter's words back in my answer. I didn't say, I don't know if terrorism was involved, anything is possible. What I do know is now. Instead, I answered Truthfully, I said, I don't know.

Because right now we're focused 100% on putting out the fire. That impulse of wanting to be really helpful and thorough, and answer the nuance of every reporters question can get you into trouble in a crisis situation, whether it's an interview, live TV or a press conference. So it's not that you're going to cover up or hide or obfuscate or all these things people think corporate communications Do that's not it? The issue is just to more quickly focus on what you do now, if you don't know something, don't be afraid to say, I don't know that one answer can solve you can solve so many headaches and problems for people during a crisis. Now, as soon as a crisis happens, it's critically important that you have your team together. Now you could be virtually it could be on the phone, it could be through Skype, video, different locations around the world, but you quickly have to brainstorm on what are the facts as you know them, what are all the messages you could say?

And then boil it down to your top three messages. And you need a spokesperson. In most organizations, the highest ranking person during a time of crisis is going to be your ideal spokesperson. So it is a special small fire in a regional plant somewhere and it's not a huge international incident. Well, then it's a crisis just for that town for that company. It may be the plant manager.

But if it's a huge crisis, suffering, it's getting international attention and you are an international corporation publicly traded, it better be your CEO. Because it really looks like you're hiding. It really looks like you have a lot to hide. And you're being cowardly. If you just sort of push out some PR person or some, some hired gun spokesperson, not to put down hired spokespersons, I've been a hired spokesperson. So not to put those people down.

But you need someone who can speak on behalf of the entire organization during a time of crisis, especially if people are being harmed. Especially if other Law enforcement officials or other regulators or FEMA, people are being brought in, you need to have your top person brought in to the shop. Now, how else can you prepare? What I recommend few people like to do this. But what I recommend is that you still rehearse before your first interview. Or before a press conference.

Now, you can say we'll teach you That's crazy. It's a crisis going on, cause you're coming in, there's cyber, there's no time to rehearse. There's always time to pull a cell phone out of your pocket. deliver your three messages, record it for 30 seconds, look at it once before going into your interview. That is a total of 60 seconds. 30 seconds to record it.

30 Seconds to watch it. And you'll feel much more confident delivering your messages for the press conference for the interview. Now if you want more tips on how to come across your best, during, frankly, a nerve wracking time, I urge you go to media training worldwide.com and sign up for the free online media training course, which is designed to help you during a time of crisis. You can see the link below in the description here, wherever you're watching this. And you can also go to media training worldwide comm and sign up for the free online course on media training. Now the next thing you need to do if you're an organization is you need to practice exactly how you're going to respond to a crisis.

When there is no crisis going on, that is always going to be the best time. So plan in advance, you can't plan every crisis, but you can plan on being able to react quickly when a crisis does happen. So I would recommend you do simulated exercises, think of your worst nightmare. type it up on a sheet of paper, get your managers together in a room and say, here's the situation 1002 today there was an exploit whatever the worst case scenario is for your organization and every industry is different. Give them a really specific scenario. And then let them know there is a reporter could be from CNN, BBC, NBC, or it could be a trade publication that's highly influential in your world, and let that person up.

This reporter is going to be here to interview you in half an hour. now. Come up with message points. Come up with sound bites. You've got a half an hour and then get the back and then interview them. But here's the thing you can interview them, recording it on video.

Whether you use a big camera camcorder your iPad or cell phone doesn't matter. capture your people on camera, record it, ask them tough questions, play it back and stop every 10 seconds or so and ask yourself, how would it be if this were the only 10 seconds against on the evening news? Very different standard, then the person answer the question thoroughly logically in great detail, because you can answer a question thoroughly, logically, brilliantly in great detail and be awful, be absolutely awful. In the final interview in terms of what gets quoted, for example, Tony Hayward, I want my life back. That was the quote that was seen around the world during the BP scandal years ago. If you looked at the answer to the entire question, he said all the right things.

He said, of course, we Want to help the golf community? Of course, we want to rebuild the community. Of course, we want to give economic assistance to anyone we've harmed. Everything he said was great positive on message. And at the very last second, he said, Hey, you know, nobody wants to get through this more than faster than I do. I want my life back to but then the, then he went back to positive messages.

If you saw the whole thing, you would think, Wow, what a great, positive, helpful, thoughtful, caring human being this CEO is. That's not what people saw. That's not the standard in a crisis. The standard is How can any 10 seconds or even five seconds of what you say, be edited, sliced, diced, put in headlines within TV broadcast to make you look like an idiot, because it can happen. Similarly, with Tony Hayward's response to litigation, one of the reporters questions to him was are you To make people whole with these lawsuits against you Tony Hayward's message, of course, we're going to make people whole. We understand we've caused economic harm.

We want to give assistance to people we want to settle. Everything you said was totally positive, non defensive. Nobody would argue with it. But then the reporter said, Well, yeah, what about the frivolous lawsuits? And Tony Hayward says, Well, hey, it's America. Of course there'll be frivolous lawsuits, but I just want to reassure people, we are going to bomb it.

Next couple of minutes everything positive on message about how BP is going to help people. What was the only quote in the story? It's America, of course, there will be frivolous lawsuits. Negative, made it seem like he was it was not our problem is just these ridiculous, litigious Americans. And it really rubbed people the wrong way. horrific quote.

That's why this is different. That's why it's important to rehearse. And that's why it's a different skill set. That's why you can be the world's greatest public speaker and frankly, be awful during a time of crisis and being a crisis communicator, because not only can you be quoted out of context, you have to be quoted out of context and reporters, interviewing you for 1020, maybe 30 minutes, they have to pull just eight seconds out. So when you complain about being quoted out of context, nobody really cares. You're not going to convince anyone, because the second you agree to doing an interview, you set yourself up for being quoted out of context.

Remember, it is not the reporters job to make you look good. It's not the reporter shot to make your corporation are your government entity look good. It's your job to do that, folks, that's Why this is hard. It's frankly, why a lot of people hire someone like me and my firm to conduct a full day of crisis communications training. So if you're interested in really taking this to the next level, give us a call. You can reach me.

I'm TJ Walker at 212-764-4955. or go to the website, media training worldwide calm. And remember at no charge whatsoever, you can get a crisis, communications media training course. Absolutely no charge. Just go to media training, worldwide. calm. I'm TJ Walker.

Thanks for joining us in this special edition of speaking. And may all of your speaking opportunities in life be a huge success, especially the crises