Have you seen a lot of blog posts filter through your stream over the past week that have something to do with the hit movie, Fifty Shades of Grey? If you haven't, you're either tuning it out, or you don't subscribe to enough blog feeds because I guarantee you that I had at least fifty in one day alone.
As a matter of fact, I just googled the phrase "fifty shades of grey blog post titles" and even taking out the review posts and Wiki, here's what came up:
“Fifty Shades of Grey: A Dangerous Distortion of God's Design”
“Fifty Shades of Grey and more” | If–like me–you wanted …
“5 TED Talks that are racier than Fifty Shades of Grey” | TED …
“Fifty Shades of Grey”: EW movie review | EW.com
“What to Read after Fifty Shades of Grey” - Ana's Attic Book Blog
“Lessons Learned from Fifty Shades of Grey”
“Fifty shades of ‘Fifty Shades’ puns” - The Washington Post
So are all of these sites and writers really that enamored with Fifty Shades of Grey? Hardly. What they are enamored with is the fact that it's one of the hottest search terms out there right now, and they're capitalizing on it in the hope that it will bring traffic to their sites.
In our industry, we call this newsjacking, and it's something you've seen even if you don't think you have. Here are a couple of examples of newsjacking that you'll be familiar with, and they are actually when newsjacking became a bit more mainstream... the night the lights went out on the Super Bowl :
Granted, both of these brands had a team on hand to be able to react immediately to what was going on, but that doesn't mean that you can't do something on your own. The most important thing to remember is that your content still needs to be good, and it should relate to the topic at hand. Using a title that just uses the term is misleading and won't win you any fans–not to mention, it will increase your bounce rate, which is a problem for some types of blogs.
Have you successfully newsjacked a topic on your blog? Did it drive traffic to your site or no?
