In 2012, David Meerman Scott identified a new strategy. He called newsjacking. Newsjacking was using news articles and events that are happening at that day to engage with your high value audiences, and this is where we're going to start building our digital marketing strategy. Newsjacking is basically holidays and other events that draw the attention of your high-value market. So there are two types of newsjacking. There's spontaneous newsjacking, events you can't plan, they just happen and you could jump in on them as well as planned. So holidays are a type of plan newsjacking event. We know the holiday, and the key with all newsjacking is you want to identify holidays and other events that are going to be of extreme interest to your high-value market. In other words, if you're marketing in China, you're going to have different holidays, and if you're marketing in India and or marketing in the United States, and if you're doing it globally, you can have your choice of a lot of different events. So basically, what we want to build into our model is, we want to build in the planned newsjacking events, basically, what I call holidays. Then we'll also build some dollars into our budget to be spontaneous if our markets will be attracted to certain sort of events that might happen. Let me give you a few examples. During the Super Bowl in 2011, the lights went out. Oreo then said, power out, no problem and advertise and talked about their cookie, and it had a huge viral impact. People who were waiting for the Super Bowl to restart started talking about Oreo cookies. So it created heat in the marketplace by doing that. The second thing about the example, that would be unplanned or spontaneous. A planned one would be Kate Middleton Royal Birth. Again, Oreo cookies and other companies use that to advertise a lot while people were looking at the Royal birth. So it coupled the company and its essence to that particular planned event that they knew what's going to happen, and they used it to advertise. You can also do things, here's another spontaneous one. Iphones had a history of cracking. So KitKat jumped on there to say, we don't bend, we break. So it was a play on the iPhone. So you can couple it with spontaneous things that are happening. But for our planning, we really want to focus in on holidays and other planned events. So again, what you want to do is, put it into your plan, the plan events. The spontaneous ones will build some extra time and extra expertise into our budget so that we can do that, but it may or may not happen during the course of a year. So step one, we want to do with our plan is to schedule the holidays. So what I want you to do is, think about the holidays that's your target market celebrate. Not you, but them. Be creative and find holidays that others don't. In other words, there are a lot of holidays that happen during the course of a year, and if they're extremely relevant to your target market, you want to identify them. We'll celebrate with tweets, Instagram posts, we may if it's something really big, do a blog or a video or a podcast. But for example, just the New Year's we might just go out and tweet, Happy New Year to people. But we also may write a blog if somehow that's more relevant to our audience. Maybe it's setting your plans for the next year. If you're a financial services, you'll probably celebrate the New Year more than a company that does other sorts of products and services. You want to celebrate as long as it's relevant to your target market. So there are some holidays, for example in China, that run the course of a week. Well, we want to then build into our plan a way of celebrating it during the week. So you want to really put it together. One of the things that's interesting is if you look at the bottom, there are actually calendars out there for most topic areas and for most countries on earth. So if you look for holidays in China or this one's a calendar of weird holidays in United States, you can oftentimes find some real interesting ones. So if for example, our market's in China, we will want to celebrate the Chinese New Year's. If we have a global market, we'll do the New Year's that the US celebrates and other countries, then we'll do the Chinese New Year when it starts. We could also do there's a National Day of Unplugging, there's Social Media Day. So if you're going out and your social marketer, you'd want to celebrate that. There is National Video Game Day, and so if your target markets are in video games, you might say, hey, happy National Video Game Day, which is July 8th. Or one of my favorites is National Drink Wine Day which is February 18th. The key is there's a lot of different holidays, and what you want to do is select those and put them into the appropriate week, and then we'll determine how much of our digital time we will spend actually celebrating that. But it may be just a tweet or post on LinkedIn, and maybe an Instagram, or maybe something more meaningful where will invest in a blog, or a V-log, or a video, or a podcast to actually celebrate the holidays. So what you want to do is drop those holidays into your calendar for the year as to when they're going to occur to build the plan. So that's the first step in building your integrated digital marketing plan.
