Search, Social, Content
Get found more often, more effectively, by more customers.
Get found more often, more effectively, by more customers.
Written by: Alex Grechanowski
As a content strategist and inbound marketer, at some point you may need to find new audiences, topics, or a fresh angle for your content strategy and community building. For this, some marketers publish more blog posts; others upload more pictures; some of my friends produce more video interviews… but often in vain.
In this post, I’d like to share just a set of tools and ideas I use for niche newsjacking. I’m not trying to compete with big brands on big news – quite often you don’t need to create yet another posting telling your community that Marissa Mayer is the new CEO of Yahoo – Business Insider, Venture Beat, Mashable, TechCrunch, Search Engine Land, Webmaster World – all of them did a great job in a matter of hours. Maybe you can be creative and offer your own twist, that second paragraph, – well, then good for you. But most likely you will able to do it just once for a headline like that – it’s the major league newsjacking.
I first heard the newsjacking term about a year ago but I immediately understood that I was actually doing it for ages. My way of implementing newsjacking is to find stories – which not exactly will become popular – but rather have a strong potential to go viral (at least to some extent) for a particular niche or community.
Over time you can become a subject matter expert or a though leader in the areas you use newsjacking. Take, for example, some topics, like social commerce, mobile analytics, trading software, social media monitoring tools, or lead management – they all are very specific areas, but with huge opportunities to dig deeper and find hidden interdependencies, build your network, and, ultimately, capitalize on the masses of uncategorized, segmental, research-based, and sometimes fun content.
The speed in which the newsjacked content is being created is super important – we’re talking about content development in real time. Blog posts, Facebook updates, tweets, LinkedIn and Google+ are all good channels to practice newsjacking. Later, the content you create might become a part of your next premium research reports, infographics or case studies.
To spot newsjacking opportunities, I’m using the following tools:
Use Quora RSS importer – a Google Spreadsheet that imports the most recent Quora posts based on a Quora category
A couple of good resources for you:
In his book Newsjacking: How to Inject your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage David Meerman Scott suggests that “newsjacking is about taking advantage of opportunities that pop up for a fleeting moment and then disappear.”
Mitch Joel suggests that the concept of newsjacking is “to interject your businesses’ story into breaking news to generate media coverage for what you’re doing.” And further “the concept of newsjacking is not a new or novel way to get media attention. Smart companies have been doing it forever.”
On the BBC you can find a quite famous newsjacking example with Kate Winslet and The London Fire Brigade.
Newsjacking in the Marketing Over Coffee podcast.
And, of course, we cannot go anywhere without a complete guide … to newsjacking.