DEVELOPING A VISUAL STORYTELLING ROAD MAP: FROM STRATEGY TO IMPLEMENTATION 145 You should also ask the brand and product team about product per- ception, competitive positioning, and important trends or shifts in the industry coming up over the next year. All of these can result in a shift in strategy and present an opportunity to plan ahead with visual content. Public Relations For your public relations team, you want to have a strong sense of their annual plan and monthly focal points for pitching stories to the news media. These themes and points can not only generate additional ideas for your visual storytelling program but they can also help in maintaining a consistency of voice. The public relations team can also tip you off to the times of year for such events as key awards, rankings, events, executive speeches, exciting partnerships, and major announcements. You should also ask your public relations team to think back over the past few years to the most common reactive issues facing your company. Everyone prefers to think about the fun and proactive side of social media, but the reality is that your business practices, values, employment poli- cies, customer service issues, how and where you source your products, and other issues can all generate a negative wave of inquiries online from your customers. The purpose of this process is to better plan how you manage these sensitive situations online and if there is an opportunity to use visual content to help resolve them. Examples could include sourcing a how-to video in response to customer concerns about how a product or service works or to give customers a look inside the facility where your products are made. This practice will also help further strengthen your relationship with your PR team because all responses in relation to sensi- tive situations need to be consistent across traditional and online media. Customer Service Your customer service team is also an incredibly valuable resource when it comes to planning for the unexpected. Depending on how long your company has been around, they probably have on file years and years of customer inquiries and the company’s responses to them. Understanding