How Digital Tools Can Work - A True Story

One of the requirements in my NYU graduate class is creating a blog. It serves two purposes. A place to complete the weekly homework assignments and a vehicle through which my students can learn experientially what it means to create and publish content.

I encourage them all to tweet out their posts and to interact with influencers online. That's always a challenge and one I easily relate to. It's one thing to complete a homework assignment. It's quite another to put that out into the world and to try and make friends with strangers. It's a scary place, not unlike the one I wrote about earlier this week.

But this is what can happen when you do.

The assignment last week was to find an example of newsjacking, a term defined as "the process by which you inject your ideas or angles into breaking news, in real-time, in order to generate media coverage for yourself or your business" and popularized by David Meerman Scott . One of my students wrote her post on what the London Hilton Hotel did to ride the news cycle around an event called Blue Monday,  a concept created a few years ago to spotlight what is considered the most depressing day of the year - the third Monday in January. 

Here's how Sonia used social media to get more attention to her post.  She tweeted the link and included David Meerman Scott in the tweet. David is one of those rare marketing people that actually practices the concept of social engagement - as opposed to just talking about it - which is just one of the many reasons I choose his book, The New Rules of Marketing and PR as the text for this class.

He read the blog and tweeted her back. 

This accomplished a few things. It made Sonia very happy. She got to see first hand, in real time,  how social media can connect. It's also a great example of CRM on David's part. David is a marketing influencer and Sonia now feels a greater and more personal connection than she did before and is more likely to help spread his messages.  And it put her blog link into his Twitter feed with his 104,000 + followers. 

When I saw what had happened I had to jump into the conversation. David already knows I use his book as our text but I wanted him to know Sonia was one of my students. 

The moral of this story is that this stuff works! Digital tools allow us to make new connections, expand our sphere of influence and overall - improve our digital profiles. 

In this case it also gave me material for a blog and a great segue to promote my new workshops! Your Digital You - the blueprint - a workshop designed to improve your digital presence.