Why you need to be newsworthy not snoozeworthy

by | Sep 12, 2011 | Articles, social media, Website

I worked on the When You Find Out You’re Pregnant – Tell Me public health campaign. The aim was to encourage women to contact their midwife as early in their pregnancy as possible. If only Beyonce had been available as a poster girl. Announcing her pregnancy resulted in 8,900 tweets per second. Was there anyone on this planet who hadn’t been told the news?

Twitter can be useful for breaking news, but also suffers from that common complaint of social media updates, blogs and news section on websites. News is often recycled. And by the time you’ve share it, it’s old news.

Here are 5 steps to becoming new news not old hat:

  1. How the news affects you and your customers. Say you are a business in the golf industry and the Open Golf Championship is on. Post a story about how you’ve responded – membership enquiries to your golf club customers has meant developing a new piece of software to help cope with demand. Express your opinion – you will always be right without fear of repetition.
  2. What you expect to happen as a result. Share you predictions for how the news will affect your business, industry or sector to mark yourself out as an expert. If you know what you’re talking about more and more people will come to you for opinion, and you’ll soon become the media’s go to expert of choice.
  3. Challenge the news. Go against the flow. You’ll stand out. Don’t be the nth person to repeat how the economic downturn is killing off small businesses. Look for exceptions to the rule and comment on those.
  4. Agree your news values. Deciding on the criteria for what is appropriate to appear as a news item, Tweet or update protects your reputation. Information shared internally may not be suitable for an external audience. For example, reporting on the success of a charity fundraising event instinctively feels like good news unless you’ve happened to announce price rises and job cuts.
  5. Take your time. Instead of responding immediately to breaking news by informing your friends of family of what they already know, take your time and respond at leisure with a well thought out piece. It’s easy to get caught up in the race to be first to share news. But if you are merely repeating, what value are you adding?

And finally, call in an expert who’ll provide the skills or capacity you may be lacking. Perfect for a marketing and communication professional and former journalist. That’s me.