144 THE POWER OF VISUAL STORYTELLING Planning for the Unexpected We all understand how important yet challenging planning is given the realities of social media. Anything can happen at a moment’s notice, like a crisis situation or a new meme taking the world by storm. Planning will help your company be more nimble to change as it hits. While this all sounds amazing, how do you actually plan for the unexpected? The honest answer is that you’re never going to predict everything that is going to happen. However, you can work with people in your company to identify common occurrences—both positive and negative—and look for opportunities to create visual content solutions around them. The proactive end of responding in real time to the latest viral sensation will be discussed in depth in Chapter 5. For the purposes of this chapter, we want to help you to identify how to anticipate key visual content oppor- tunities in advance based on past history as you build up your content library. In order to do this, you need to form a cross-department team of people who can help you to understand key themes or issues that have required a rapid response in the past. Typically this team will include people from brand and product marketing, public relations, and customer service. Brand and Product Marketing For brand and product marketing, you want to understand the most important factors that can influence sales and customer leads. For exam- ple, if you’re a hardware shop, a heat wave may result in a sudden surge of sales for air-conditioning units and fans. Or a snowstorm will generate a rush to the store for shovels. When you’re planning your content calen- dar ahead of time, this isn’t necessarily stuff that you can write in, but it’s important to your company. Identifying weather as an important theme around which to craft content to support key business goals allows you to get ahead of the game by crafting generic visual content around heat waves, snowstorms, dry spells, and other weather events. Save this content in your library for a rainy day—literally!