How to create a crisis plan in less than 30 minutes

Several months ago, one of my clients had to fire a client.

My client is a small company, and a few employees manage the brand’s social media sites. I’m the de facto marketing director.

Firing a client is never easy, but it’s much harder when you’re running a small company. You can’t afford to have one patron gobble up most of the resources and cause others to complain.

Success or failure was going to happen fast; the fired client had already mobilized his team on social media.

Engage the 30-minute crisis plan

We had 30 minutes to create a crisis plan. Here’s how we did it:

5 minutes: Understand what happened. We let the client go. The client took to Twitter and posted to Yelp.

5 minutes: Understand what could happen. We created a spreadsheet of all the review sites we were on that the client had not yet attacked. We also included a list of review sites we weren’t on.

2 minutes: Identified our biggest fans (people who loved us and had great experiences with us), and gather their contact information.