Newsjacking in Social Media Age

Newsjacking is injecting your ideas into a breaking news story so you and your ideas get noticed. Social media has provided us with the access and immediacy of news. This real-time approach is most successfully leveraged if there is relevancy between the brand/product and the news story and the content is clear and creative. The core concern for brands are how they are related to the breaking news. It’s best to have an identifiable proximity to the news or current event, but that is not always necessary if you can craft content or manipulate the news in a funny or original way so that it works for your product or brand.

The number one most important factor in effective newsjacking is speed. You must strike while the iron is hot and make sure you have a quick and great content strategy.  It is crucial to have the first stab at creating extra buzz around the event. By doing so, especially through the use of Twitter, you can gain more awareness of your brand and can definitely see a spike in your follower count if the message is well developed and received. Between retweets, favorites and influencers searching for content around the news and landing on your tweet, your brand image can be recognized as a leader in that time frame for responding to the news. Another factor to include would be the use of already established hashtags. This allows for reporters and other media professionals to find you and your tweet while they search for content to bulk up a story.

A great example I know would be JCPenny’s tweet related to the black and blue/ white and gold dress meme that was floating around on the Internet. JCPenny made it very relevant as they tweeted a picture of a black and blue leopard dress they were selling and said, “We promise, we aren’t messing with you, this dress is blue and black.” I believe JCPenny was smart enough to jump on the dress meme, while cunningly pushing their own dress and being funny all the while. They didn’t choose sides, as a lot of other brands do, so as to not alienate people that had a firm belief it was black and blue or white and gold. The language used in the tweet was also funny and neutral.