After Prince William and Kate Middleton got married in April of 2011, no one could stop talking about Kate’s wedding dress.
Within hours after the wedding, vendors began making near-identical copies or similar styles of the Stella McCartney- designed dress. Even vendors such as David’s Bridal now have a “Royal” category so you can dress “just like Kate.”
When something is buzz-worthy, it creates high demand. In situations like this, you can align offers with “what’s hot.” Companies will often leverage newsjacking for this type of technique and it works very well for offers, too. As an example, earlier this year people couldn’t stop talking about Pinterest.
Create new streams in your social media management tools to help you find out what is trending and get on top of it to help amplify your own marketing. The earlier you can get on the bandwagon before it “goes viral” the faster you can rank in searches and the more people you will find attracted to your information.HubSpot capitalized on this craze by creating the first Pinterest ebook for business owners and marketers, How To Use Pinterest for Business. It quickly became one of HubSpot’s most successful ebooks with more than 125,000 downloads to date. Because it was the first and only ebook available on Pinterest (and we made sure people knew that), and learning how to use Pinterest for marketing was in high demand, it made the offer more unique and thus more irresistible — that’s the power of leveraging both timing and popularity!
Newsgathering happens in real time, and it can encompass anyone who steps forward quickly with credible input.
This creates a fierce and desperate hunger for newsjacking. Searching Google, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, YouTube, and whatever else comes to mind, the reporter scans for any plausible nugget to differentiate her story.
The challenge for reporters is to get the “why” and the implications of the event.
All this is what goes in the second paragraph and subsequent paragraphs. That’s why the newsjacker’s goal is to own the second paragraph.
If you are clever enough to react to breaking news very quickly, providing credible second-paragraph content in a blog post, tweet, or media alert that features the keyword of the moment, you may be rewarded with a bonanza of media attention.
By leveraging newsjacking, you can also utilize the bandwagon effect through blogs, webinars, conferences and more to help traffic more qualified leads into the funnel.
