Riding on the coattails of a big news story isn’t a new tactic, but in an increasingly measurable media world, spotting an opportunity is becoming more science than art.
‘Newsjacking’ is a creative marketing approach which has attracted a surge in interest in recent months. It’s the process of latching your product, brand or message to a news story or event that’s already getting media attention. Marketing strategist David Meerman Scott (@dmscott) coined the term in his 2011 book of the same name – informatively subtitled ‘How to Inject Your Ideas Into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage’.
Although there’s no set rulebook for newsjacking – one of its most exciting traits is the degree of imagination it permits – the key to news success lies in identifying news stories and trends that are making the break from niche interest to viral behemoth.
Many NewsWhip clients use our Spike tool to spot stories worth “jacking” – or sharing and engaging with – so we’ve been paying attention to the space. From our learnings, here are five tips for newsjacking success.
1) Be attentive. Newsjacking opportunities often come from the most unlikely of sources, so a clever ear, capable of judging the news value of a story on the spot, is a serious advantage.
Listening to the morning radio on August 7, writer Lyndon Antcliff (@lyndoman) had his attention held by a piece featuring a UKIP MEP who was calling for aid to ‘Bongo Bongo Land’ to be stopped immediately. Correctly sensing that the comments would provide at least a day’s worth of strong news coverage, he hooked up with a music shop in Scotland to arrange for a set of bongos to be sent to the politician’s office, along with a press release. It resulted in a deluge of coverage from journalists and media outlets eager to add details to the nascent controversy.
2) Be specific. Not all great newsjacks are spur-of-the-moment ideas scribbled on a napkin. Trying to track what’s popular among the swathes of content published online every day may seem like a bewildering and unapproachable challenge.
So, identify a beat: an area or areas where your audience can be found, and where you want to show leadership, entertain or engage. What are the feeder (tier 2) blogs that feed stories into the ecosystem where your audience can be found? Who are the key Twitter leaders? (They might not be the people with the most followers.)
One great tech advance: social networks increasingly allow us to track and map these stories on their route to virality. Monitoring systems such as our own content discovery platform Spike can be of great help in surfacing the stories spreading fastest on Facebook and Twitter.
While this might appear boring compared to high profile Oreo-moments, an approach like this will give you many small wins – and eventually may lead to a big hit – the newsjackpot.
3) Be quick. Once you’ve managed to identify a match between story and brand, time is of the essence. Latching onto yesterday’s story or arriving at the scene too late is of little use to the marketer – in most cases, the social media pack has likely long moved onto fresher content pastures.
According to Meerman Scott, the ideal time to strike with the newsjack is just as the news has broken and reporters are eager for additional information to add a unique angle or to beef up their paragraphs. If the newsjack enters the discourse at this stage of the story’s news cycle, there’s a good chance it’ll stay right in there until interest peaks. (Shameless plug: Spike is great for finding stories ahead of their major growth curve.)
4) Be bold. The term “newsjacking” is a recent one, but the basic idea – such as a business congratulating the royal family on the birth of a child, can be traced right back to the early days of print advertising. However, these campaigns are unlikely to harvest all that much interest from an increasingly discerning and critical social media audience.
In a piece for the Guardian earlier this month, head of strategy for global media agency Maxus, Stuart Butler, argued that ‘lazy’ efforts such as these do little to enhance a brand’s long-term reputation, or to increase their ‘emotional standing’ in the eyes of their target audience.
A more daring and effective example of a brand capitalising on the arrival of the UK’s future ruler was The Sun changing their masthead to ‘The Son’ the day after the birth, which instantly caught consumers’ eyes as they perused the newsstands that morning and likely raised more than a few pun-appreciative grins.
5) Be sensitive. The flipside of being bold – sorry. But necessary. Poor newsjacking can bring major PR blunders on social media (a topic we’ve previously covered in depth on The Whip)
Tragic stories often dominate the news. Obviously, brands attaching themselves to these situations must exercise caution. There’s a genuinely appropriate and altruistic way of newsjacking a negative event – like the Hilton Hotel Group in Sydney deciding to offer beds to bush-fire and flood victims. Then there’s the insensitive route. American Apparel’s decision to hold a “Superstorm Sandy Sale” in the midst of the second-costliest hurricane in American history (which claimed the lives of almost 300 people) received a vitriolic response online.
Sometimes news stories need a bad guy – don’t make it your brand. Unless of course, that’s part of the strategy.
Happy newsjacking!
