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.
I've always been a planner. At times to the point of obsession. But the older I get, the less crazy I make myself about it. I know that no matter how hard you try you cannot and will not control everything. Things will happen that no one expected. And they often get in the way of the original blueprint. The key is to be flexible when it does and be open to the idea that the change might be even better than what you had planned for.
Don't get me wrong. If you want to create something you need to be clear on what it is and you need to figure out what it will take to manifest it. A plan must be in place whether we're talking life or business.
The really smart and the really successful know better than to hold on too tightly to the plan as written. They reassess along the way and are flexible enough to improvise when needed, looking at the twists in the road as opportunity instead of disaster.
Take Sunday night during the Superbowl. No one planned a power outage in the Superdome that would delay play for thirty-four minutes. There was a championship to decide and commercials to air. Yes, those :30 and :60 spots reputed to be sold in the vicinity of $40 million. A huge money maker for CBS and a huge expenditure of an advertising budget for even the deepest of pockets.
Witness the smart thinking and agility of Oreo and 360i. Oreo had bought a commercial in the game that had already aired. According to Buzzfeed, the agency and the brand had set up a "mission control" in advance, basically meaning the agency and the decision makers for Oreo were in the same room when the lights went dim. Within minutes the team had turned around the situation, effectively "newsjacking" it. They created and tweeted this new ad, capitalizing on the moment.
Not only did this generate an extraordinary amount of Tweets and Facebook likes, people like me are continuing to write about it, generating even more conversation about their brand than they could have planned for.
Newsjacking is a relatively new concept coined by David Meerman Scott , what he calls "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."
There were other brands who were also acting with agility including Tide and Calvin Klein, more evidence that this is becoming the way of the world in which we live, whether we are speaking to advertising campaigns or our lives.
Things are changing, faster than ever before. Five year plans can become five minute plans at the touch of a button. Which means we either need to respond more quickly and be more agile or we will be left in a cloud of dust...or in this case cookie crumbs.
