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How to leverage breaking news and trending stories for content promotion.
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Hi, everyone, this is your host, Sayed, earphone Atmel. And in today's episode of The si a business podcast, we are going to discuss how anyone can leverage newsjacking to come up with create content, ideas, create content and promote the content pieces that they have came up with. Now before I move on to explain what newsjacking is and how to use it and share some of the really interesting case studies Allow me to explain
problem, okay. Now before internet was really popular and you know, newspapers were basically the primary source of information for everyone. And by newspapers, I mean, you know, the physical, tangible newspaper that you can hold in your hand, right? So these newspapers would come once per day.
Magazines would come once a week or once a month or twice a month right. Now, surely there was television that one could use to get some information, but I guess most people were dependent on their newspaper, which would come early in the morning every day right. Now, what has happened in the last sort of couple of decades is that Internet has become extremely huge and extremely popular. A lot of the newspapers have went out of business and the problem with television show later, a lot of television shows and a lot of live news.
channels and all that. But there are a lot of people who are dependent on the internet for getting their information, right. And until 2006, maybe 2007 or 2008, there were a lot of people coming online for the very first time in their lives. And the number of people who are consuming content online was huge, and it was increasing every single day. And compared to that the number of content creators whether, you know, independent bloggers, or or media outlets online was extremely small, right? So the demand side for online content was very great till 2006 2007, maybe 2008. But the supply side content creators was a small, right, so until then, it was quite easier. It was a lot easier to see a blog post you posted today getting more likes or comments or shares.
You know, and of course, I'm not saying that, you know, anyone who got success until then with their blog or their business online, was, you know, just lucky or just in the right time or something, but surely there was not a lot of competition right. Now what has happened since then is that of course, the iPhone came and and other smartphones grew as well and improved and all that internet speeds have improved. So the demand has increased, but it's not increased as much as the number of people who have been creating content or all these years moving on from you know, basically 2007 till 2019 or whatever, right. So what has happened and also you should keep in mind that, especially in western countries like America, maybe Canada, UK, Australia, the number of people that were supposed to get internet or get online, is pretty much TD now. Okay, so it's
not expecting a massive increase or something for developing countries. It's a different story. But we are talking about Western countries, especially America and countries, which are sort of in a similar situation, right. So now there are a lot of media outlets online. There are a lot of newspapers who basically depend on the internet for reaching their audience. And there are a lot of more bloggers and Instagram influencers and YouTube stars and all that, right. So the competition for getting attention has become way more tougher, and the fact that everyone's getting distracted by one app or another app on their smartphone. Their email is asking for attention. The fitness app is reminding them something about the weight or training or something. There are a lot of messages coming up on WhatsApp and
Twitter and Facebook. So there is a lot of competition if you're trying to get your content noticed, right? And and the audience is already actually suffering from a bit of information overload because oftentimes there is so much information and there is so much content which is vying for their attention. Right. So basically, the problem right now in the online media world is that it has become a battleground for attention right. Now, one potential solution, of course, I'm not saying this is the only solution, but one potential solution is newsjacking, which is also known as real time marketing. And basically what it does is that if if there is an ongoing, interesting viral, trending breaking news story going on, then you can use newsjacking to try to promote your brand with that trending story right?
So what it does is that you see what your audience is interested in. And you see that there is a story which is going viral or about to go viral. And you sort of come up with some kind of content, whether it's an ad, whether it's an infographic, an article or something, a video, which is kind of related to that viral story. Okay, so to give you a quick example, Hootsuite is a social media scheduling app, right? So if you are managing different social media accounts for yourself for your business, and you want to make it easy for you to schedule specific posts to go get published at specific times on let's say, LinkedIn, Twitter, blah, blah, blah, what you do is that you can use Hootsuite right now what Hootsuite did was that they saw that there was a new season of Game of
thrones coming up. And what they did was that they came up with a video, which was called game of social thrones, right? And the game of social thrones has had, I think the same music or pretty much similar music to the actual game of thrones music. So Hootsuite came up with this video called game of social Thrones. And it has had music which was, I think, the very same music that Game of Thrones uses or it was something very close to it and and you see that just like Game of Thrones has had about seven kingdoms. The game of social thrones video created by Hootsuite also has different kingdoms, which are sort of you know, battling it out and there is the kingdom of Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn and all that right. So it was just a simple I think one minute video animation. It was cool to watch and it was interesting and anyone who knew Game of Thrones could see that okay, this is you know, a nice sort of parody of the actual
Video, right? And that video received over 1 million views on YouTube. Right? They came up with that second video as well, Hootsuite. And I think that one was quite popular as well. Okay. So that's sort of a basic example. This may not have been the perfect example, I suppose, because, you know, we don't know if a lot of people who watch Game of Thrones are also very much into social media and using an app to manage their social media, you know, things like that, but it was a basic example to give you an idea and as like I said, it has received over 1 million views. You can see that it you know, it worked to quite some extent, right. So newsjacking or as it is known by a more formal name, real time marketing. It requires a quick action plan. A lot of people get their news in real time through social media or breaking
story, a wider story is often short lived. So you want to make sure that if you want to leverage newsjacking for your brand, that you jump on on the band wagon early on, right and if you are an agency or if you have an in house team of marketers, which is going to leverage newsjacking you have to realize that I was told by hosts and the Johnny whom I have had interviewed for this description of newsjacking or send mentioned that, you know, there is no time for the typical agency model where you come up with a content idea and you send it to the customer or the client and then you wait for them to approve it and they will take maybe days or weeks to think about it and study it and you know, then give you the go ahead on that. Instead what percentage Johnny mentions is that it has to be a super quick plan of action, it has to be executed quite quickly. Okay. Now, let me show you
some more examples of newsjacking. So the first one is that of Etihad Airways, which is Middle Eastern airliner. And when the team sponsored by them Manchester City failed to win the Premier League Championship in 2013, it thought airways did something smart to basically cash in on the rival teams when, okay. And it was so interesting and it was so funny and that's why it got a lot of attention as well. It caused them a lot of free publicity and all that. So like I said Manchester City, that team which was sponsored by the heart Airways, it has had lost in the football competition, right. But the airline published an ad in newspapers, and it shows that the United players are leaving in a city sponsored taxi and you know what?
There's isn't a lot of space in that taxi. And so the rival teams members are sort of sitting in, you know, awkward positions within that taxi. And the funny thing is that of course, they are sitting in a taxi, which is sponsored by Manchester City, right? And the headline with that picture that was put by the heart airways is that Congratulations, Manchester United, you deserve to go home in style, you know. So it's a very interesting and funny sort of sarcastic remark and got it the harder ways You know, a lot of smiles and promotion right. Now, the second campaign that I'm going to talk about is seven elevens. Seven election campaigns. Okay. So what 711 does is that every time there is an election day, they come up with a fake election of their own. So what I mean by that is like to give you an example in during the 2012
presidential elections, they have had two types of coffee cups that one could choose from was a blue cup. And that was, of course, for anyone who supported the Democratic candidate Obama. And if you supported the Republican candidate Romney, then you have had to pick the red cup. Right? So you have had two choices blue for Obama and red for Romney. And the interesting bit is that 711 has had done this for a long time now, in multiple election campaigns. And I believe they have had based on the number of cups they sold, they came up with a prediction of who is going to win, and there was only one election where the prediction was proven to be incorrect. But in all other election campaigns, we are 711 ran their seven election campaign, their prediction was, you know, correct. Now, the third example that I'm going to use is how
How you can become the star of someone else's party. And this is what Trump has done in an interesting manner before he became the American president. So to give you an example, and by the way, this is not an endorsement of Trump's policies or anything, this is not a podcast about politics or anything. This is just to show you an example of how Trump and or his team has had done a great job at getting free publicity, you know, so during the Democratic National Convention 2016, the media was supposed to be focused on what Hillary Clinton is saying or what Obama is saying. And you know, that activity has had to go on for at least a week, right? But instead, what happens is that the media has had to speak about Donald Trump and you know why, because while that DNC was going on, Trump was live tweeting about Clinton speech and other Democratic Party members.
speeches. So the media had to quote him, the media had to talk about him, even though this was supposed to be about DNC and Hillary Clinton, right. And by the way, just to give you an example, Trump generated about 5 billion with the be worth of free media publicity, right? So he received over 5 billion worth of free publicity, and that's twice as much as the publicity that Hillary Clinton received for free. And to give you an example, of Jeb Bush, he spent $200 million on paid advertising like TV ads, and I guess radio ad and that got him you know, four electoral votes, you know, each word costed him $50 million. So I mean, just think about that for a second, you know, so, I hope these examples have helped you. We spoke about Hootsuite and how they leverage game of social thrones or I mean, how they leverage Game of Thrones and came up with
By Game of Thrones video, we spoke about how it the hot airways despite the fact that their team lost how they managed to get publicity online and in the analog world by poking some fun at the rival team, we spoke about how 711 did something really simple blue cup if you support one party red cup if you support the other party, and like I said their predictions have been accurate except in one election, right? I'm not sure which election that was, but I will make sure I include details about that in the description and the show notes of this episode, Trump tweeting during the DNC 2016 and how it made the media to take note of what he was saying. We spoke about that and we spoke about how Trump was able to generate a lot of free publicity doing that. And by the way, I will also include links to Trump's tweet sexually.
And how much retweets were they getting and I will also include a link to the game of social thrones video that was created by Hootsuite. Okay, and I will also include the banner image where you can see that the Manchester United players are sitting in a city sponsored taxi. And you know, they look weird. They are sitting in awkward positions because they're just returning from a party and they are in a small taxi, a lot of players in a very small taxi and of course, it's a city sponsored taxi, like I said, so that ad is really funny, the one that was created by it, the higher the airways. So that's it for this episode, I believe. And I should also mention that this episode is actually based on an article I wrote for Forbes Middle East so I will include a link to that as well. And thank you so much for listening and let me know if you have any feedback, any critique questions or anything
relevant examples that you have came across or any news jacking hacks that you have used in your business or that you plan on using in your business. Thank you so much for listening and feel free to leave a review for our episode on iTunes, Stitcher, or whichever podcast platform you use to listen to our podcast.
Thank you for listening. For show notes and other resources. Please refer to the description of the show