During the NFL American Football Conference (AFC) Championship game played on January 18, 2015, game officials alleged that the New England Patriots used footballs that were inflated to a pressure below the league standard. Some pundits claim that underinflating an American football makes it easier to grip, throw, and catch, presumably giving the Patriots an unfair advantage over the Indianapolis Colts. Very quickly, the Twitter hashtag #DeflateGate took off on social media, and news outlets adopted the Deflategate moniker in many of the hundreds of stories that were written about the incident in the days that followed.

Soon, brands were tweeting, blogging, and publishing videos using the #DeflateGate hashtag, injecting their ideas into this quickly developing news story. Krispy Kreme Doughnuts tweeted via @KrispyKreme an image of a football shaped like a donut with the line “Ours are fully filled #DeflateGate.” (This jab was particularly delicious because Krispy Kreme’s rivals, New England–based Dunkin’ Donuts, is a sponsor of the Patriots.) The Krispy Kreme image was shared tens of thousands of times on social networks and seen by millions of people. Tire manufacturer Michelin USA tweeted via @MichelinUSA an image of the Michelin Man with a pressure gauge checking a football. It carried the witty line “Inflation Matters #DeflateGate,” and it was also widely shared, getting Michelin noticed at no cost.

Newsjacking.

As hundreds of millions of people were learning about the underinflated footballs in news stories and via social media, brands like Michelin USA, Krispy Kreme, and others seized the moment in real time and injected their brands into the most talked-about news story that week. As a result of these clever tweets, millions of people were exposed to these brands at no cost to the companies. Compare this approach to the traditional route: paying millions of dollars for television commercials during NFL games.

As we’ll see in this chapter, newsjacking succeeds when it is very fast to market and tastefully (or at least nonoffensively) ties back to the brand and its ideas.

It’s not just consumer brands that newsjack. When Democrat Tim Kaine and Republican Mike Pence faced off in the 2016 vice-presidential debate, then-candidate for president Donald Trump took to his @realDonaldTrump Twitter feed to live tweet during the debate.

For example, when his running mate Pence discussed his views on the police, Trump live tweeted: “I agree Mike – thank you to all of our law enforcement officers! #VPDebate “Police officers are the best of us . . .” @Mike_Pence.

Trump’s live tweet during the debate using the hashtag #VPDebate ensured the media would see and comment on his views. I’m convinced that his mastery of real-time communications and newsjacking techniques was an essential strategy in electing Donald Trump the 45th president of the United States.

You can do the same in your marketplace.

Journalists Are Looking for What You Know

The real-time web has opened a tremendous opportunity for anyone to get their brand discussed as part of the news of the day. I’ve been a marketer for two decades, and I have never seen a technique as powerful. But newsjacking requires speed to market that most organizations reserve only for crisis communications. We’ll be covering the basics of newsjacking in this chapter, but if you want to learn even more, you can check out my online course, Master Newsjacking.¹

As journalists scramble to cover breaking news, the basic facts of the story are often easy to find. That’s what goes in the first paragraph of any news story. The challenge for reporters is to get background information that rounds out the basic facts, or the details that appear in subsequent paragraphs. If they’re lucky, journalists also find unique story angles that competitive media are not yet reporting.

That’s what makes newsjacking possible. Reporters are actually looking for additional information for their stories, and they’re doing it by searching Google and the other search engines, as well as Twitter and other social networks.

If you have a legitimate tie to a breaking news story and you react in real time—by providing additional content in a blog post, tweet, video, or media alert—journalists may find you while they are researching material for their stories.

Newsjacking opportunities can turn up in unlikely places. But you’ve got to be quick when the opportunity arises.

Remember the tabloid item about a naked Prince Harry in Las Vegas, first published by TMZ?² It was one of the most searched and discussed cell phone photos of all time. Lots of marketers tried to newsjack the stories of the Vegas romp. While most attempts went unnoticed, several were highly successful.

For example, soon after the photos appeared, Unilever-owned Lynx Men’s Deodorant responded with a parody of the World War II UK government “Keep Calm and Carry On” posters. Its version used the line “Sorry Harry if it had anything to do with us.” Many people talked about the ads in social networks, and the UK media wrote stories—all generating positive buzz for Lynx Men’s Deodorant.

Likewise, the scene of the Prince Harry photo incident was the luxurious Encore Wynn Hotel. In what was another very clever newsjack of the story, owner Steve Wynn publicly waived the hotel bill (we’re talking tens of thousands of dollars), which got the Encore Wynn into a stunning 3,657 stories by my Google News count. Stories like the one appearing in the United Kingdom’s Daily Mail, “Living like a king: Prince Harry’s £30,000 hotel bill ‘waived’ by Vegas billionaire,”³ were essentially huge, free advertisements for the hotel. Such stories often came with descriptions and photos of the Encore Wynn and its royal suite.

This is a perfect example of newsjacking success. For the price of waiving a few hotel nights, the Wynn gets mentioned in thousands of stories. How cool is that?

This isn’t the first time that representatives from the Wynn hotel organization have successfully newsjacked a story. They also scored thousands of press mentions when they banned infamous party girl Paris Hilton from their properties after she was arrested for alleged cocaine possession. So as the media reported on Hilton’s arrest, many also mentioned that she had been banned from the Wynn properties.

Get Your Take on the News into the Marketplace of Ideas

Your goal with newsjacking is to get your take on a breaking news story in front of journalists at the moment they are looking for additional information to put in their stories. There are a number of ways to do that, with the techniques falling into two categories. The first category relies on journalists searching online for interesting story angles. Here, your job is to create the content they will find. The other category is to quickly push your message to the media directly.

Let’s look first at the search-based techniques, and then at some techniques that allow you to target individual reporters and media outlets. Here are some of the ways you can make your message stand out.

How to Find News to Jack

The most important aspect to successfully injecting your ideas into a breaking news story is to follow the new rules of speed. You’ve got to build that real-time mind-set that I wrote about in Chapter 8. The traditional marketing and PR model—creating “campaigns” with long lead times—just doesn’t work when a story breaks quickly. Now doesn’t mean tomorrow. It means now. Newsjacking is amazingly powerful, but only when executed in real time.

There are three broad areas in which to find stories for newsjacking opportunities:

1. Things you already know—the news that’s happening in your marketplace, geographical location, or areas of personal interest.
2. Things you didn’t think to ask in the wider sphere of breaking national or global news.
3. Widely known current events anticipated in the immediate future to which you can tie a news hook.

The trick is to devise news-monitoring strategies that keep you instantly informed on each of these levels.

To cover the news that’s happening right now within your immediate sphere, you will want to monitor media and journalists you may already know, including influential bloggers and the trade publications that cover your marketplace. If you run a local business—a home renovation company, perhaps—then your hometown paper is a perfect place to start. We’ll take a look at how to monitor this news first. Then we’ll turn our attention to news you don’t see coming from outlets you may not yet know, followed by a look at current events such as holidays, elections, and other types of activities that you do know will be occurring.

Tying Your News to Current Events

While the best newsjacking opportunities come at you as a surprise, sometimes a holiday, sporting contest, entertainment release, or other event is a perfect hook on which to hang your news. It’s more difficult to get news coverage around these events (many more people will try to newsjack stories they see coming), but you never know what might work.

For example, when Justin Bieber released a new single, Charlie Treadwell, director of global social media at technology security company Symantec, thought this seemed like an occasion ripe for newsjacking. “The Biebs was having some personal challenges, and the Grammys were trending,” Treadwell says. “I asked my community manager at the time, Allen Kelly, to keep an eye out for a relevant opportunity to create a real-time campaign.”

Kelly came up with a very clever idea for a simple tweet sent through the account of Symantec’s Norton brand of antivirus software. @NortonOnline sent out an urgent-looking, text-heavy image designed to resemble a security warning. It read, “ALERT: If someone sends you a link to download the latest Bieber single, DON’T DO IT! It’s a link to download the latest Bieber single.” They also shared the witty image via Facebook and other social networks. So did tens of thousands of people.

“This story not only generated more impressions than we had seen to date, but we had customers running back to us that had been detractors for years,” Treadwell says. “We saw comments like, ‘I’m on my way to Best Buy right now to purchase your product’ or ‘I uninstalled your free trial; will you ever forgive me?’ Word of mouth leads to loyalty and ultimately sales. We saw an 18 percent spike in online sales for the 48 hours following this tweet.”

The goal of newsjacking is to get noticed and let the buzz you create in both social media and traditional outlets drive business. That’s exactly what happened to Treadwell, Kelly, and the Symantec team. A simple tweet that cost them nothing took off because of a tie to a news story and drove a measurable increase in sales.

Sometimes you can predict newsworthy events ahead of time and become a part of the story before it breaks. That’s what Toyota did to newsjack the story of the newly retired space shuttle Endeavor as it made its way from the Los Angeles airport to its permanent home at the California Science Center. The shuttle had to be towed through the streets of Los Angeles, and at one point on the route, it had to cross a bridge that had a weight limit too low for the machines doing the towing. To avoid any issues for that short part of the journey over the bridge, a Toyota Tundra pickup pulled the Endeavor instead.

Because marketers at Toyota were able to plan ahead, they built a website for the operation. To get people to talk up the effort, they offered to donate $50 to the California Science Center for every tweet mentioning the #TundraEndeavor event. The total came to just over $200,000 (and yes, I tweeted).⁶ That price tag might be a little steep by newsjacking standards, but it did get a lot of people talking about the Tundra.

Twitter Is Your Newsjacking Tool

For dedicated newsjackers, there is no tool more essential than Twitter. It is both a primary source of newsjacking ideas and a powerful channel to get your message out to the media in real time.

Twitter is used by both journalists and media outlets to share links to stories being published. If you follow the Twitter feeds of the reporters and media outlets covering your market, industry, or company, then you’ll know about fresh content as it appears. So as you identify key sources, be sure to follow them on Twitter. You can also use a Twitter application like TweetDeck or HootSuite to monitor your key phrases.

Many journalists rely heavily on Twitter to research the stories they’re working on. Especially when news breaks, reporters immediately turn to Twitter in search of eyewitness reports or direct comments from people in the know. A vital link between newsjackers and journalists is the Twitter hashtag—a keyword or phrase preceded by the hash mark (#). Hashtags serve as unique identifiers to make it easy to instantly locate references to a particular subject.

For example, Peter Knox’s commute was affected by flooding in the New York City area in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, which devastated the U.S. East Coast. Knox works in Hoboken, New Jersey, but the PATH rail stop he uses had been closed. Knox (@peterknox) tweeted,⁷ “I can’t afford the $60 a week ferry anymore. Now attempting the PATH walk from Newport to Hoboken today. pic.twitter.com/8RI9jChu.” The attached image was a map of his route. Soon Matt Flegenheimer (@mattfleg) from the New York Times tweeted back about a story he was working on. The two used Twitter to agree on a time to speak that day. The resulting story,⁸ “In a Hobbled Hoboken, Overbooked Buses, Unfamiliar Ferries and Long Lines,” quoted Knox.

When news breaks and you have something to say about it, post your comment as a tweet with the appropriate hashtag. Your idea just might be seen by a journalist eager to fill out a story with additional quotations. Sometimes they’ll even quote your tweet directly.

Beware: Newsjacking Can Damage Your Brand

To successfully newsjack a story, it is best if you have a legitimate tie to it. Especially in the case of negative news, such as the death of music legend Prince, a solid connection is essential.

It seems like every few months a well-known brand tries to piggyback off a tragedy. General Mills’ tribute to Prince is one such example of newsjacking gone bad.

Like American Apparel (which newsjacked Hurricane Sandy to promote a sale), AT&T (which newsjacked the anniversary of 9/11 to promote its mobile phone plans), General Mills was criticized for its use of a Cheerio as the dot of the “i” of its purple “Rest in peace” graphic.

Many people reacted on Twitter. Stewart O’Brien (@stewN16) had one of the more biting critiques: “Dear Universe. Please return Prince & take the CMO of Cheerios instead. #PrinceRIP”

Yes, Prince is from Minnesota, as is General Mills. But that tie was not strong enough to promote cereal on the back of somebody’s untimely death.

The story was widely reported in mainstream media, with the Wall Street Journal running a story “Cheerios’ Tweet on Prince Is Latest Brand Faux Pas.” Fox News also carried the story, saying “Cheerios Tweet saluting Prince angers grieving fans.” Soon after the media storm, Mike Siemienas, manager of brand media relations at General Mills, issued a statement: “As a Minnesota brand, Cheerios wanted to acknowledge the loss of a musical legend in our hometown. But we quickly decided that we didn’t want the tweet to be misinterpreted, and removed it out of respect for Prince and those mourning.” Still, the damage had been done.

This sort of frivolous newsjacking attempt gives the concept of newsjacking (and also marketers in general) a bad name. Ploys like this are blatant attempts to exploit a tragedy, and the insensitivity runs the risk of angering customers and mobilizing the media.

To be successful, attempts at newsjacking must have a legitimate tie to the story, especially when the story is about a disaster, death, or any other negative event.

There were several organizations that legitimately newsjacked the death of Prince. For example, Chevrolet posted a photo of a red Corvette with the caption “Baby, that was much too fast. 1958–2016.” Music fans likely know that one of Prince’s best-known songs is titled “Little Red Corvette,” so this tribute was seen as in good taste. It was shared some 15,000 times on Facebook, and the media noticed and wrote positive stories about Chevrolet.

Newsjacking is indeed powerful. But you must balance the need for quickness with an equal imperative to stay on key. Tone-deaf contributions almost always produce negative feedback.

Newsjacking for Fun and Profit

You can newsjack, too. All it takes is some creativity and the ability to respond very quickly.

Trent Silver, a young Internet entrepreneur, has been building web businesses since he was a 15-year-old high school student. One of his businesses, Cash for Purses, finds new homes for high-quality designer purses and handbags—brands like Gucci, Prada, Hermès, and Chanel. The sales generate cash for the former owners as well as for Silver.

A major challenge for the business is attracting people with used handbags to his site to sell them. That’s where newsjacking comes in: Silver monitors the news, looking for breaking stories related to handbags.

For example, Silver enjoyed a barrage of press when he tied his business to financially struggling starlet Lindsay Lohan, who might have been hard up for cash but certainly didn’t lack for handbags. Silver recognized that Lohan was sitting on a gold mine and didn’t even know it! So he crafted a pitch to celebrity websites that cover Lohan, saying that his company would purchase her extra handbags to help her pay her bills. He even offered to donate his profits to charity.

Silver understands that celebrity sites are always looking for exclusive stories, so he pitched the top sites first. Since Lohan’s financial troubles had been in the news, that was his newsjacking hook. Radar was the first to run with it: “We’ll Buy Your Purses, Lindsay! Company Offers Big Money for Cash-Strapped Lohan’s Leftovers.”

Once the story was out, other sites started to pick up on the resulting buzz. The Huffington Post ran with “Lindsay Lohan Offered Money for Used Handbags by Fundraising Company,” and the Inquisitr wrote, “Lindsay Lohan’s Purses May Be Key to Financial Freedom.”

Interestingly, people who read celebrity news sites seem to also be people who want to sell their purses. In the weeks after the story broke, Silver received 8,000 new leads from people who visited Cash for Purses ready to sell their designer bags. “I was able to close 19 percent of the leads,” Silver says. “And it brought in almost $250,000 worth of bags. This has also helped me to get to the top page of Google for any searches related to selling purses.”

Soon after the online media outlets ran the story, Silver began receiving inquiries from other publishers, resulting in a full-page story in Essence magazine and a television mention on Katie Couric’s talk show. This publicity led to more people visiting the Cash for Purses site and more business for Silver.

“I use Google News, and I read celebrity news sites, so I’m following the news all day,” Silver says. “I’ve found it helps to have a legitimate position to take when going to the media. I really want Lindsay Lohan to sell me her purses. I really want to donate the same value of all her bags to charity. It’s not a publicity stunt; it’s a real offer.”

Silver is a news junkie, so he enjoys watching for interesting events he can tie his business to. “I read voraciously because I know that I have to get the word out for my businesses in a way that people will understand,” he says. “I make sure I am up-to-date on what’s going on in the world to see if somehow I can align my businesses in a positive, interesting way. It’s definitely an art and a science.”

Since Silver runs his own businesses, he has the luxury of being able to put the word out without getting multiple approvals from people in the organization. If you own your own business, too, you should run with his advice.

But if you work at a larger organization, don’t use that as an excuse. You can still get buy-in from decision makers when there’s good potential to generate interest in your company and its products.

“Don’t be afraid to try something different,” Silver says. “Different gets noticed. If you don’t get noticed, you’re not doing your job.”

Whenever there is a hot story in the news, there is an opportunity to create and publish original content that the media will find and cover. You can newsjack a story by writing a blog post, shooting a YouTube video, creating an infographic, or even publishing an e-book.

Newsjacking is cool. It’s fun. And it gets you ink!