How to prepare for any communication crisis with Tom Ciuba

In this episode, Tom Ciuba joins On Top of PR host Jason Mudd to discuss crisis management and how to build a crisis communications plan.

Tune in to learn more!

Short Guest Bio

Our episode guest is Tom Ciuba, Vice President of Communications at Genesee & Wyoming. His diverse background includes roles in consumer PR, association marketing, and employee communications.

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5 things you’ll learn during the full episode:

1.  What is considered a crisis and issue management
2.  Why you should hire an outside agency to establish your crisis plan
3.  How to update your crisis plan
4.  How to manage social media chatter during a crisis
5.  Lessons learned from crisis communications

Tom Ciuba

Tom has been a professional communicator for 15 years and currently serves as Vice President of Communications at a freight transportation company. His diverse background includes roles in consumer PR, association marketing, and employee communications.

Quotables

• “It’s PR, not ER.” - Jason Mudd
• “No update is still an update.” - Tom Ciuba
• “We've written dozens and dozens of crisis plans for a variety of industries, a variety of companies of all sizes. And we've been brought in to manage those. So that body of knowledge from our entire team can really be contributed and added value to a crisis plan versus maybe what you can do from the inside.” - Jason Mudd
• “Come up with templated responses that if such a situation were to arise, you'd be prepared to answer quickly should the media or the public be knocking on your door.” - Tom Ciuba

Resources

Additional Episode Resources:

• Strengthening a Crisis Comms Plan Amid Disruptions 
• Connect and learn more about Tom Ciuba on LinkedIn.

Additional Resources from Axia Public Relations:

• Listen to more episodes of the On Top of PR podcast.
• Find out more about Axia Public Relations.
• CrisisPoint

Episode Highlights

[03:11] Is the term crisis overused today?

Jason: “It’s PR, not ER.”

• Yes!
• We see everything today because everyone can record instances via their phones.
• These social media instances would lean more towards issues management instead of crisis management.

[05:24] How to start a crisis plan

• Hire an outside firm.
  • Sometimes you need an outside perspective and fresh eyes.
  • They can help manage the crisis with you while you manage all the other company communications that still need to be going on.
• Think of worst-case scenarios to develop templated responses.

Jason: “We've written dozens and dozens of crisis plans for a variety of industries, a variety of companies of all sizes. And we've been brought in to manage those. So that body of knowledge from our entire team can really be contributed and added value to a crisis plan versus maybe what you can do from the inside.”

[11:23] How to update your crisis plan

• Update at least once a year.
• Review what is going on in the news and in the world to make adjustments.
• Review crisis communications from other companies to use as inspiration.
• Watch for current issues happening, especially with competitors. 
• Continually touch base with your clients to make sure that they’ll be behind you amidst a crisis.

[16:03] Managing social media chatter during a crisis

• It’s almost impossible to manage. 
• Outside firms can help but still not capture it all.
• An outside media monitoring platform is the best way to bridge the gap and work through all of the noise during a crisis.

[18:08] Lessons learned from crisis communications

Tom Ciuba: “No update is still an update.”

• Ensure your website content management system allows for swift modification and includes an emergency response.
• Provide at least one update per day. 
• Make sure you have a really good comprehensive plan for potential town halls with the public.
• Don’t use acronyms or technical jargon in your crisis plan. 
• Use your industry’s premier membership association if it has one.
• Engage government representatives.

[22:00] Tips for dealing with crisis communications

• Always be thinking about cybersecurity.
• Have expert sources pre-identified and ready to be available. 

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Transcript

Jason

Hello and welcome to On Top of PR. I'm your host, Jason Mudd with Axia Public Relations, and today we're talking about strengthening a crisis comm plan amid disruptions.

Jason

Our guest today is Tom Ciuba. He is Vice President of Communications with Genesee and Wyoming. He's been a professional communicator for 15 years and currently serves as the vice president of communications. His diverse background includes roles in consumer PR association, marketing, and employee communications. Tom, welcome to On Top of PR.

Tom

Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Jason

Yeah, we're glad to have you. And, you know, just so our audience knows, I saw you wrote an article for Press's magazine Strategy and Tactics, and it caught my eye. I like how you were talking about strengthening a crisis comm plan amid disruptions, and crisis communications is a big part of what we do at our agency for our clients and for companies who come to us either in crisis or expecting a crisis to occur.

Jason

It's always good to connect with someone in the industry, especially who is on the corporate side, who can really share a lot of experience doing crisis work. So, Tom, how do you get your go bag packed in your car and you’re always ready to go when a crisis happens? Or are you usually staying near HQ whenever you have a crisis?

Tom

So in my case, usually staying in HQ challenge with my company is just the size of our our footprint. Right? So we have railroads, freight, railroads in 43 U.S. states, five Canadian provinces, and then the U.K., Europe. So I think in theory, I'd like to believe that I'd be able to be on the scene for a crisis.

Tom

But that's easier said than done.

Jason

Yeah, sure. Have you had situations where there's been like you know, if you were going to be on the scene, you need to be in two places at once? Or have you kind of avoided that dilemma?

Tom

No. So I'm sitting at a desk made of wood right now, and I'm going to tap it real hard and knock on wood, as the saying goes. Yeah. I've never been in my nine years here. Just celebrated nine years last week and have never been in a situation like that. So fingers crossed. But that does not mean that my team is not prepared and practice for such a situation.

Jason

Yeah, of course. Because when it rains, it pours, as the other cliche goes. Right. So. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, so do you have a crisis go bag in your car where you're ready to go at a moment's notice? I feel like some people have really gotten away from that since the pandemic.

Tom

So you're making me second guess myself because I actually have a go bag. But it's in my office. And now I'm thinking, you know what? It probably does belong in my car.

Jason

Yeah, yeah.

Tom

Yeah, I do. I do have a bag packed and ready to go should I ever need it.

Jason

That's right. Hopefully, you got your passport in it too, right?

Tom

Yeah. A copy of it.

Jason

Yeah. Well, Tom, again, I'm really glad to have you on the show. So let's talk. We have a few questions here for you. So is the term crisis overutilized by today's standards, would you say? I mean, I think the gist of that question is that, you know, seems like in the post-pandemic and during the pandemic era, everything felt like a crisis for a while.

Jason

What do you think?

Tom

Yeah. So I think you're onto something with that. But I would say yes to answer the question. But I think for me, what makes it more overused is the advent of social media. Yeah, right. And TikTok and Instagram and how everybody thinks they're a reporter nowadays with that device in their pocket. Right. You know, what is it?

Tom

Every day now we see some kind of situation going down, whether it's, you know, an unruly customer at a Starbucks or an unruly passenger on a United Airlines flight. Does that constitute a crisis for the company? I don't know. You know, certain things. Sure. Like a couple of years ago, Chipotle had that food poisoning, mass food poisoning situation. 

Tom

That's a crisis. The Bud Light situation of late. Sure. That could be considered a crisis. But your typical unruly passenger every day on a, you know, well-known airline. I'm not sure that a company needs to consider it an absolute crisis.

Jason

Yeah. Yeah. Well, American Airlines has just been called out by name, so. But for good reason, right, Tom? I mean, you know, they've had their PR challenges, especially post-pandemic and even before that. And anyway, you know, I tell people sometimes, you know, when they're really overworked about something, you know, I just say it's PR, not PR, Right?

Jason

And so, you know, most of the time there's not an issue. There's an issue maybe, but not necessarily a crisis or there's just a preference of how the brand is positioned in the marketplace, not necessarily what I would call real-time crises. So I think your point, to what we're saying here is that sometimes issues management might be a better word than crisis management, given the certain circumstances of the situation.

Jason

Does that sound fair to you?

Tom

Yeah, that's a brilliant way of putting it.

Jason

Yeah. Okay. Well, I appreciate that. All right. So how does an organization go about creating a crisis communication plan if they don't have one?

Tom

So I think the first thing they have to do if they're new to this and they truly don't have one and they're starting fresh from the ground up, I would hire an outside firm who specializes in this.

Jason

At least I did not pay you to say that.

Tom

Oh, at least to get you through that first iteration. Right. You're getting a true crisis plan up and running. I would say that that's key. Second is to think about sitting down long and hard with every member of your or, you know, every executive member of your organization. And think about truly what is the worst-case scenario for us.

Tom

Right? Right. You come up with a list of that. So that way you can come up with templated responses that if such a situation were to arise, you'd be prepared to answer quickly should the media or the public be knocking on your door.

Jason

Yeah, right. And it's those unexpected circumstances. Right. And just as you know, Tom, I used to be on your side of the equation. I was always on the client side and rarely, if ever, agency side. But now that I'm agency side, you know, I have this ability to see things that I couldn't see when I was client side. And, you know, if I were working in a department, I would ask myself how many times as people have the people in my department have written a crisis plan, been involved in a crisis situation and specifically for other industries or other geographic regions and things like that, that, you know, by hiring an agency, hopefully, you're getting a diversity of experience, opinions, insights, and all that good stuff to them. 

Jason

So, you know, to that end, you know, we've written, you know, dozens and dozens of crisis plans for a variety of industries, a variety of companies of all sizes. And we've been brought in to manage those. So that body of knowledge from our entire team can really be contributed and added value to a crisis plan versus maybe what you can do from the inside.

Jason

One of my mentors has a cliche and I'm going to brutalize it here, but he says something like, you know, the fishbowl looks a lot different from the outside than it does the inside. And sometimes you just have the perspective of the view of the inside of the fish bowl instead of the goldfish bowl instead or the other way around.

Tom

Yeah, no, I think that's definitely something that comes with age and experience. So when I was younger before working in the rail industry, as I do now, I worked in the chemical industry. So again, it was a very risk-prone or crisis-prone industry. Right? Right. Someone had recommended a firm, an outside firm for me to look into to help us develop or to update our crisis plan at the time.

Tom

And I was offended by that suggestion because I was like, ‘Well, then what am I here for?’ Right. When you're young and you're trying to climb that ladder and trying to prove something, you're thinking, ‘Why am I going to go outside and pay somebody when I'm the director of communications? Why? Why don't you value my input?’ But it's exactly what you said.

Tom

Sometimes when you're in an organization for so long, you need that outside perspective. You need to step away a little bit. And an outside firm is somebody who has a fresh approach and fresh eyes to something. And it's absolutely necessary.

Jason

Yeah. Before we hit record, I mentioned to you that I just got back from a speaking engagement and Tom, while I was there, you know, I just part of the thing I shared was, you know, when you hire an outside agency, a lot of people, some people will go through this idea of to hiring an outside agency. Then why does the company need me?

Jason

And I'm worried that they might eliminate my job. And it's quite the contrary because guess what? When you have an outside agency, somebody still has to coordinate with them and somebody still has to liaise between them. But most importantly, that frees you up from doing the day to day activities and deliverables behind a computer screen and allows you to get in front of and get with your your boss, your leadership team, your executives, your department heads, maybe even your board members, and be a trusted advisor to them and elevate not only the PR program in the communication program or in some cases, the marketing program at your company, but also elevate your status and stature in the organization and be highly available to be an advisor and a coach and a counselor.

Jason

Which, if you're busy knocking out the deliverables and a one person show or a small department and you're overseeing a team, unless you've got an agency partner or good middle managers or good leaders internally within your own department, you're really going to have a hard time, you know, being available at a moment's notice and being all in and really able to think strategically and think creatively and bring a fresh perspective to the table.

Tom

While doing your day job. You know, because some crises can go on for quite an extended period of time and the organization is still going to need to run. You're still going to need to do that day-to-day. So exactly, you're spot on.

Jason

And I think the worst situations are kinds of crises that keep going. Are these lawsuits? Right. So you have a legal situation and, you know, three, four, or five years, I don't know. I don't want to exaggerate. But, you know, they go on and on and on and on and on. And so you feel like the crisis is happening now and it's short term.

Jason

And then when that's over, suddenly lawsuits are dropping and legal actions are being had and conversations are happening. And so, you know, we helped an organization in crisis, you know, years ago and pre-pandemic, and just the other day, they were finally, you know, their legal matter was finally closed out. You know, after all these years. And they were very grateful to us.

Jason

And, you know, some of the ideas we brought to them, they were able to use as part of their legal defense. And it worked out great for them. But for years, they were under this cloud until they could just get it all cleared up.

Tom

Yeah.

Jason

All right. So how does an organization go about updating an existing crisis plan? And Tom, maybe whether it's your personal recommendation or the corporate policy, but how often are you recommending that people update their crisis plan?

Tom

I would say at least once a year at a minimum. And I think the best way to update it is just to keep an eye on your industry. Just, you know, keep track of anything that's going on that's making news or making headlines, watching how companies are responding, particularly if it's a crisis, and then kind of reviewing what you have in place and tweaking it based on what you're seeing in real-time.

Jason

Yeah, I like that a lot. And that's exactly what we do. We watch for situations, Tom, where other organizations are in crisis or they're going through a crisis and what they do well, where they do bad. And we are often making notes in our own internal files for crisis communications. And sometimes you'll see a sound bite, a quote or media statement, and you're like, ‘That's gold.’

Jason

Let's write that down. Let's copy and paste that. Let's put this in our idea list for future times, or, you know, let's copy that whole communication, the media statement, an email message that was sent to employees, or whatever. And then we can always be inspired and borrow from it later when we need it. The other thing we do is watch for the issues, right?

Jason

The issues that are happening. And so we say, okay, so what do you do if one day your company has a product recall like these guys did and you know, or maybe you're monitoring a competitor and you're like, ‘Gosh, I never thought that could happen in our industry.’ But it did, you know. And so in your particular case, right, trains derail and there's stuff on those trains.

Jason

Well, some companies might not be in the freight or rail business or logistics business. So they never think about it. But then again, they are in the logistics business if their products are being transported. Right, whether it's indirect or direct, and if their product is on there and it causes supply chain issues or it causes quality issues or just their products weighing in the streets.

Jason

Right. Or and, you know, created a litter, then that becomes a problem for them and their organization that they probably never thought much about.

Tom

Yeah, that's a great point. I mean, certain industries you're going to have to lean on, I guess, your partners, for lack of a better term. Right? If we're transporting goods for a client or a customer and that customer's product is involved in an incident, they're going to need to have a crisis response as well. So probably part of updating that plan is just keeping track of your customer base or your client base and making sure that you're touching base with them as well to ensure that they're going to be on your side or work with you through a crisis.

Jason

Yeah, we worked with a large global publicly traded company for about 10 years. Great people run a good business, you know, smart, high integrity, all these good things. And they never experienced a crisis while we were working with them. But the reason they hired us, you know before that was they had a crisis. They had no PR counsel in-house so that was after the dust.

Jason

So they said, we've got to find a PR firm. We have to start doing PR to build our strength in our brand and protect our reputation in the marketplace. So for seven years, we worked with them doing preemptive and proactive PR. Everything was great. And, you know, they were certainly paying us well enough to cover the crisis, but they just didn't need us.

Jason

And then one year they had seven crisis events happen within 12 months, not because they did anything wrong in their company, right? It was just the act of doing business right. And so during that process, they really leveraged us and said, ‘Man, we got our money's worth out of you guys this year.’ And I was like, ‘Yes, you did.’

Jason

So, you know, and my point is, is to your point, you don't know when it's going to happen, but you know, it is going to happen as long as you're in business. The longer you're in business, the more likely it's going to happen. And so, you know, to my next point, I want to talk about social media just a little bit and how that's changed and how that's changed crisis.

Jason

And I started to think of some of these legacy companies that have been around 100 years. Maybe they've been fortunate, not had a crisis situation and, you know, 15, 20 years. But, you know, now's the time really to kind of dust off that communications plan and make sure you've accounted for all the modern technologies of today that we have.

Jason

They do equip. Do you? Well, too, but you have to use them responsibly. So the cliche of, you know, with great power comes great responsibility. And so just because you can text message all of your customers or tag at everyone on a social media channel doesn't mean you should do that unless the circumstances dictate. So can you really manage social media and social media chatter and social media activists during a crisis?

Jason

What do you think? Tom?

Tom

I think it's becoming harder by the day, right? Like I remember when social media first hit the scene, I was very young in my career and the thought process at that time was you have to respond to every comment that's out there. Yeah, I think nowadays that would be impossible. Even if you hire an outside firm, right?

Tom

Or if you have a large in-house communications team, what you would help is to have an outside media monitoring platform that can kind of work through the noise for you to help you identify the issues and that you're only going to be able to respond to the things that are going to move the needle, right? Yeah. This is my advice for companies out there who are going through a crisis.

Tom

And I think it's just flat-out difficult nowadays to think that you're going to be able to respond to everything and truly manage the noise on social media.

Jason

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. All right, Tom, we're going to take a quick break and be right back on the other side to talk more about crisis and strengthening a crisis communications plan. Thank you for being here, Tom. And we'll be right back.

Jason

Hello and welcome back to On Top of PR. Thank you for the quick break while we rehydrated and got a little bit more organized on our end, but we're glad you're still with us and Tom is still here.

Jason

Tom, good to see you again. And we just kind of want to wrap this up as we enter the second half of the show. We want to talk about just kind of in your experience, what are some lessons learned you have from crisis communication that you sense our audience would benefit from hearing? And hopefully, if they're not driving, they're going to take some notes here because I think we've got some really good.

Jason

Yeah, don't do that. Yeah, right. Because then you'll have your own crisis that you have to do.

Tom

Exactly. Exactly.

Tom

All right. So that's hard to whittle down, but let me see if I can get these down to, like, half a dozen. Does that sound good? That's great. First and foremost, I would say I feel like this is pretty standard nowadays, but just ensure that your website content management system allows for swift modifications and includes emergency response banners.

Tom

WordPress is what we use at my company. They're great for that. I know Squarespace is good as well, but you just want to be able to switch something on really quickly nowadays. And it shouldn't be this whole to do to get a crisis message up there. It's not like, you know, five or 10 years ago when you had an HMO code, everything.

Tom

Second thing I would say is to plan during a crisis plan to provide at least one update per day. I created my own little motto that no update is still an update. I think that's super important today with the news cycle. It's okay to go out there and say that, you know, cleanup is still underway or the road is closed. The road closures are still in effect, working as quickly and diligently as we can to restore service.

Tom

Just letting people know that you're there working on the situation I think goes a really long way. The next thing I would say is to make sure you have a really good, comprehensive plan for potential town halls with the public. That's the last place that you want something to go wrong, right? Because not only are you going to have media and local government there, but you're going to have members of the public there.

Tom

And what are they going to have? They're going to have this in their hand. And if anything goes wrong, it's likely going to be filmed by them, not by the media. So just have a plan to be able to successfully execute a town hall without angering the people who are affected by your crisis. The next thing I would say is probably simple.

Tom

If you're in an industry like mine, the railroad industry, we are just acronym-heavy. I could throw five or 10 at you right now that would go right over your head. You'd have no idea what it means. Simplify your industry terminology now so that you don't have to do it later because you do not want to use any kind of acronyms or technical language in your crisis communications.

Tom

You want to make sure everybody's understanding what you're saying. The next thing I would say is probably tap into your industry. If your industry has a premier membership association and most industries do nowadays, right? Tap into them, lean on them, and allow them to help. So specifically for the railroad industry, if we were to have a derailment at my company, they would be able to speak about the industry as a whole.

Tom

Rights law I'm speaking about to the media and giving messages about my company-specific response. They'll be able to talk about how safe or how regulated the railroad industry is as a whole. And that's definitely going to enhance your message and enhance your story. And I'd say the final thing is probably to engage government representatives in a crisis.

Tom

Government officials can either enhance your crisis response or they can terribly hinder it. So you want to make sure you have those relationships with those people, whether it's local, state, federal rights at the senator level, if applicable. You want to have those relationships before a crisis happens because you're going to need to lean on them to help you get your message across and for them to verify your message.

Tom

Last thing you want is for them to give a conflicting message about your company or about your response. So that's what we say is probably my biggest lesson learned. Hopefully, that's not too many. But those definitely resonate with me this year.

Jason

Yeah, those are good, Tom. Those are good. So let's kind of back and forth here for just a minute. You kind of mentioned several things. I really like it. So one thing that came to mind is you were describing kind of like a CMS to update your website, right? To that end, I know years ago they used to call it having the ability to make a dark site live.

Jason

Right? And yeah and now that the dark web is kind of a term maybe you know maybe there's another term for that. But you know, the idea is that you've got a site that you don't promote, you don't publicize, but it's ready to go live in a moment where the first thing people see is that crisis. And some people have done banners and pop-ups.

Jason

And, you know, I know during the pandemic, everybody had like that red line that said we're still open for business, you know, and that kind of thing. So I think that's good. And then the other thing that triggered me, Tom, is, is when you said WordPress and Squarespace, you know, I thought to myself, okay, if you're using a, you know, a very consumer-friendly web interface like that, you probably need to add your crisis plan.

Jason

What happens if we get hacked or what happens if our site gets, you know, gets sprayed or something like that? Because I remember.

Tom

Excellent point.

Jason

Yeah, I was on vacation one year and my phone rang and somebody from the office was calling saying, you know, and we weren't responsible for any of these websites, but they're like seven of our clients had their website hijacked overnight and now there's really inappropriate images and stuff all over their page and all that stuff. And I was like, ‘Oh, I'm glad I'm on vacation.’

Jason

So I said, ‘Okay, so what are we doing about it?’ And they told me some of our clients are saying, ‘Hey, they don't want to work with their web company again.’ I said, ‘Well, it's not necessarily the website company's problem, but just like Windows tends to be a target for viruses, WordPress and these other sites tend to be a target for getting hacked.’

Jason

And if they can find a plug-in that's vulnerable or a port that's open or something like that, there's lots of ways. But my point is, when you said that, I was like, ‘You know what our audience needs to know? They need to prepare for these things, right?’ So whether it's you know, now we call it cybersecurity, but, you know, when this happened 10 years ago, it was just, you know, my website got hacked.

Jason

So make sure cybersecurity is something you're thinking about, right, folks? So, you know, you might be in the rail business and you've got real crisis plans, but what happens when things happen otherwise? You mentioned town halls and that got me thinking, Tom. Also, we recently did a town hall with a client and I really love this. So we had very personable, likable people greeting people who were coming to the town hall as soon as they got there.

Jason

And, you know, like, here's the restrooms, here's where we're doing this or whatever. And they're just people like that. We're ambassadors from a brand that I don't know. My client must have looked high and low to find the nicest people who work in the company. The people that you would never want to say anything mean to or hurt their feelings.

Jason

And that was the first impression you got. So you're coming in. This big company is doing X, Y, and Z, and I'm not happy. And then you meet the nicest person in the world who's your new best friend, right? And then they literally escorted them to the area of the town hallway they wanted to go in. And what my client did, which I thought was really smart, we did not set up a town hall where there's a traditional mike and stage and audience.

Jason

It was a walk-through tour of, you know, we set up. It reminded me of your grade school science fair, right? So there are different stations or exhibits set up along the way. So no one person. No, there was no microphone, right? So nobody could kind of take over the meeting in the town hall. And instead, it was a form to walk around and get educated on what we were doing.

Jason

And then there's an expert, an independent expert at each station either representing the engineering firm, the architecture firm, or the county government who was involved. And so each station was staffed by somebody who knew way more than anyone else who was going to show up and could address their questions or the myths they heard, the rumors they heard there were maps and visuals that they could point and walk people through.

Jason

So when everyone was leaving, they felt like I learned a lot. The person who makes decisions or can influence decisions heard my concerns, addressed my concerns, wrote down my questions, my name and number, and all that, and that was something I thought was a fantastic event. I was really proud of it.

Tom

Yeah,

Tom

I love that. I'm going to borrow these.

Jason

Yeah, Yeah, exactly.

Tom

At my own.

Jason

Yeah, Please do. Please do. And then when you mentioned about, you know, just kind of having your acronyms and all that, I started thinking to myself, ‘Wouldn't it be great if we had like a glossary of terms for media again, to be helpful?’ Like you're covering an industry you probably never covered before. Here are some basics. Here's what you need to know to be able to cover it.

Jason

You know, savvy and all that good stuff.

Tom

Especially nowadays with the disappearance of the beat. Reporter, right. Nobody's a scientist. What's that?  

Jason

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. No, I love that. That's good. And then you. You inspired this idea. I really like this, which is, you know, I wrote down, have expert sources pre-identified and ready to be available because, you know, in media relations, you're trying to hand-deliver a story to a journalist where it's, you know, in our case, our client or in your case, your company.

Jason

Oh, and three other people. Two or three other people you could also talk to that would help round out this story. Here's their name, here's their number, or whatever. And maybe some of you already have a relationship with someone that, you know, is a credible person and send them calling some rando down the street who, you know, or they just thought would call and, you know, whatever.

Jason

And they don't know the first thing about what they're talking about versus you helping them find somebody who's really credible and understands the business and can speak to it independently. But with that independence as well as authority and experience. So I like that as well. Yeah. So, Tom, this has been a good collaboration session.

Jason

Yeah. If other people want to get in touch with you, maybe they heard the episode and they're like, ‘Oh my gosh, I love what Tom said. I've got follow-up questions.’ Or maybe they want to invite you to come speak to their group or their association. What's the best way for them to get a hold of you?

Tom

LinkedIn – tried and true LinkedIn, Tom Ciuba, Tom Ciuba.

Jason

And that's exactly how I reached out to you as well. And it is. And if you're a loyal member of our audience, you know, I always say this, always tell them why you're connecting with them and how you heard about them instead of just hitting that connect button. And they're like, I don't know who this Jason Mudd guy is.

Jason

Why would I connect with them? That will make you stand out way more and create a much better first impression, especially if you're in the communication field, for crying out loud. So yeah, Tom, this has been great. Thanks again. We will be sure to put links in the episode notes to Tom's LinkedIn. We'll also put some other resources in there.

Jason

There'll be a transcript, there'll be playback links to your favorite platform, and a great way for you to refer a friend who you might think, ‘Gosh, this episode would really help a colleague of mine or a friend of mine in the business.’ So with that, this is Jason Mudd from PR signing off, and thank you for allowing us the opportunity to help you stay on top of PR.

Sponsored by:

• On Top of PR is produced by Axia Public Relations, named by Forbes as one of America’s Best PR Agencies. Axia is an expert PR firm for national brands.
• On Top of PR is sponsored by ReviewMaxer, the platform for monitoring, improving, and promoting online customer reviews.

About your host Jason Mudd

On Top of PR host, Jason Mudd, is a trusted adviser and dynamic strategist for some of America’s most admired brands and fastest-growing companies. Since 1994, he’s worked with American Airlines, Budweiser, Dave & Buster’s, H&R Block, Hilton, HP, Miller Lite, New York Life, Pizza Hut, Southern Comfort, and Verizon. He founded Axia Public Relations in July 2002. Forbes named Axia as one of America’s Best PR Agencies.

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