How to hijack the news
How do you hijack the news exactly?
News hijacking is the bread and butter of many B2B tech PR campaigns. That’s true for cybersecurity, telecommunications, fintech, enterprise tech, and honestly, pretty much everything else. A news story breaks – maybe another consumer brand hit by a crippling security breach (hopefully not, but that’s a likely story these days). Suddenly, the races are off for members of the press to cover the story while it’s still fresh.
Not every journalist will go out of their way to jump on a breaking news story right away, but generally speaking, when an issue breaks, the media wants unique insights to explain how and why the issue happened. They might want to hear whether industry experts approve or disapprove of what has transpired. They frequently want to hear solutions to the issue in question.
If you’re a vendor with unique insights that shed light on an incident, news hijacking is a surefire way to raise your brand’s visibility. But it’s not without caveats. News hijacking for the sake of it comes with a certain stigma inherent in all ambulance chasing.
In theory, you can react to any incident with a rapid-fire comment. But as Jeff Goldblum put it in Jurassic Park: just because you can doesn’t mean you should – at least, not right away.
What makes a successful PR news hijacking?
If we’re really simplifying things, the success of any news hijack hinges on three pillars, and arguably in the following order of importance:
- Having something relevant and interesting to say
- Saying it in a timely fashion
- Building great relationships with the media
The last point needs caveating. A good relationship with a journalist is not a prerequisite to securing coverage. You could be the godchild of a telecoms reporter at The Wall Street Journal, but that doesn’t mean they’ll publish your comment on the latest merger in the mobile operator space. A bad take is a bad take. You need to know that the journalist you’re dealing with trusts your information.
Building trust is about consistently giving the media reliable and quality commentary. Partnering with a PR agency can help narrow down the exact messaging you’re comfortable sharing with the media. At Babel, we always kick off our PR and marketing campaigns with a position paper, informed by messaging calls with spokespeople, which defines the vendor’s unique positions across industry topics.
Planning ahead: a smarter approach to PR news hijacking
News hijacking doesn’t always have to be reactive, either. You might be surprised by how much you can predict in the news cycle just from looking at upcoming regulations, major sporting events, elections, anniversaries, etc. It’s well worth keeping a calendar of the things you know will spark conversation. Timeliness is king, and it’s much easier to be timely (and at the top of a journalist’s inbox) when you already have messaging you can adapt.
Having said that, it’s not always about being faster than Lightning McQueen; it’s about what value you’re adding to a conversation. In fact, sometimes being the first is the worst, especially if you don’t have all the facts.
Every incident has its own tailpipe. Sometimes that tail is very short, i.e people stop talking about the incident the next day. Other times, you have a CrowdStrike incident that invites experts to contribute analysis in the weeks or months to come. A great PR campaign hinges on knowing when it’s more tactical to wait for the follow-up analysis article. Sometimes, it really just better to say “I don’t have a comment right now, but when I do, you will be the first to know.”
Keep in mind, too, that even if you do have written commentary ready to go, but you miss the boat on news coverage, there’s a lot more you can do with that commentary. A few ideas include:
- Save it for follow-up articles with the press.
- Turn it into an opinion article, either for the press or your website.
- Pitch it as a Letter to the Editor or a podcast discussion topic.
- Repurpose it for social media.
There’s honestly a lot more that can be said about news hijacking. But that is a lesson for another time…
In the meantime, if you’d like to explore how a PR agency can help your brand ride the wave of the tech news agenda, get in touch.
Babel
From the Babel team
