Understanding Newsjacking & How It Can Help Your SEO
As a marketer or even as a small business owner, you know that you need to find a way to have media cover your news. So, one of the things that many marketers and small business owners have been doing is called newsjacking.
What Is Newsjacking?
Simply put, newsjacking is just a way to get more attention to your story, to make it more popular, so you can amplify your marketing success and your sales. This is done by riding the wave of a much larger more well-known new story.
The term newsjacking was popularized by the book Newsjacking: How to Inject Your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage book (Scott, 2011). The main idea behind newsjacking is that news is always breaking every second. So, as a marketer or small business owner, you have the opportunity to take advantage of this popularity around the clock. While this kind of popularity may only last for a couple of hours or days if you’re lucky, the reality is that it creates a positive impact on your business. So, you just need to align yourself with the trending topics and take advantage of one.
When Should You Newsjack A Story?
Like everything in life, newsjacking has its own timing. So, in order to understand when the best time to newsjack a story, you first need to understand the lifecycle of a news story. No matter if a news story lasts for only a couple of hours, days or even weeks, it always follows this order:
#1: Breaking News:
This is when the event actually happens. At this moment, news outlets report all the details they have at the moment as fast as they can. This is the ideal time to newsbreak.
#2: The Excitement:
While it depends on the news, the truth is that if it has an impact on the world, you can be sure that journalists will try to get more details and information each second. In case you have some detail that no one has, this may be a good time to newsbreak.
#3: The Peak:
At this moment, the overall public or audience is already aware of what happened, and they have even heard the same story told through different perspectives. In case you succeeded newsjacking the story, your content will be able to rise with this peak.
#4: Old News:
This occurs when everyone is tired of hearing the same story over and over again. This means that there isn’t interest in it so there’s no point in newsjacking this story.
How Can Newsjacking Help with Your SEO?
If you closely read the different stages of the news, you understand that while the news starts small, its popularity starts increasing up until it reaches a peak. So, as you can imagine, when the story starts to be popular, more and more people will use certain keywords to find anything about it.
So, when you are able to newsjacking the story when it is still gaining traction, you will be able to take full advantage of it up until it reaches its peak. Keep constantly in mind that you won’t be the only one pursuing this strategy, the reality is that if you discover the news story soon, you will be more successful than the others who join at a later stage. So, as you can see, this can have a good impact on your SEO not only in the short-term but also in the long-term.
“Start by identifying as many voices as you can. List all the relevant trade journals. Find securities analysts who cover your sector. Look overseas to find content on your industry in distant markets. Search for relevant online forums or chat rooms. Pinpoint bloggers who have discussed issues relating to your business. Keep searching continuously for new sources.
The next step is to begin monitoring what your sources say in real time. As its name suggests, the really simple way to do this is to use RSS (really simple syndication), a tool that allows you to harvest content from hundreds of blogs and news feeds without having to visit each one. RSS feeds update each time a site changes, alerting you to relevant information on topics that you specify. I use Google Reader and NewsFire for this, but there are many RSS readers to choose from.
This is not simply a question of missed opportunities. If you cannot react in real time, you risk being torpedoed by a competitor, an unhappy customer, or the Occupy Wall Street kids.” Book excerpt. Of note with regards to newsjacking is definitely the concept of Signature management. So, two examples of newsjacking are as follows:
You have a means of positive newsjacking, or attention wave riding done by the Tide brand. This is one of the best all around ways to execute this particular strategy. If you have ever watched news coverage of a natural disaster in the aftermath there is one symbol that remains almost as constant as the channel logo. That is the tide truck equipped with washers and dryers providing a basic service for free but subliminally gaining “Signature Managed” free promotion. In almost every piece of post event coverage in both local and national news you always seem to be able to spot this Bright orange truck with workers in bright orange shirts helping those displaced by getting them clean clothes. From the program website: Tide brings hope and not just soap into the world through sustainable practice, innovation, and disaster relief with Tide Loads of Hope. Tide believes in the power of clean, and for our friends going through times of crisis, clean clothes can make a difference. Ever since Hurricane Katrina, Tide’s Loads of Hope program has been providing clean clothing for families in the midst of chaos through its community outreach program. With a mobile laundromat, Tide is able to bring hope to devastated regions and has provided hundreds of families in need with washed, dried and folded laundry on each visit. Not only is this great for PR but it’s an example of humanity at its finest, Thank you and all of those involved with your “Loads of Hope” program.
Then you have the negative newsjacking strategy and a striking example used by the NRA and exposed in a transcript of an interview a consultant did with a politician from New Zealand. Google (NRA busted coaching far-right Aussie party to exploit shootings, “African gangs”) for more on this. In a nutshell NRA officials were secretly recorded advising a far-right Australian party on how to exploit mass shootings to push their pro-gun agenda. Their strategy is as follows: The officials were advised to “say nothing” at first but go on the offensive if inquiries persist. Then there were advised to shame officials in a direct quote “If your policy isn’t good enough to stand on itself, how dare you use their deaths to push that forward?” he (NRA consultant) urged them to say. “How dare you stand on the graves of those children to put forward your political agenda?”.
They continued guiding them to find “friends in the media” to help push stories. Another quote “We want to print up stories about people who were robbed, had their home invaded, were beaten or whatever it might be and that could have been helped had they had a gun. And that’s going to be the angle on your stories. That’s what he’s got to write. He’s got to put out two to five of those a week.”. They were instructed to : uses columns purportedly written by law enforcement officials that were actually ghostwritten by gun lobbyists. It doesn’t stop there, yet another quote “We pitch guest columns in the local papers,” she said. “A lot of the times, we’ll write them for like a local sheriff in Wisconsin or whatever. And he’ll draft it or she will help us draft it. We’ll do a lot of the legwork because these people are busy. And this is our job. So, we’ll help them and they’ll submit it with their name on it so that it looks organic. You know, that it’s coming from that community. But we will have a role behind the scenes.”
The final part of the article I wanted to highlight is : The NRA officials advised him to use those stories to amplify racial fears using social media as well as the previous channels.
“Every time there’s a story there about the African gangs coming in with baseball bats,” he said, “a little thing you can put out there, maybe at the top of a tweet or Facebook post or whatever, like with ‘not allowed to defend their home,’ ‘not allowed to defend their home.’ Boom.”
Understand this is not an indictment of the NRA or their consultants this was added to highlight the concept of negative Newsjacking and an instance of its application.
#contentweapons #metaleadership
Michael Stattelman
