Placing News Hijacking in the Tech PR Budget – Part 1: The Knowledge

As an agency, one of the things Spark has prided ourselves on is our ability to hijack the news; i.e. spot a breaking news story and make sure that our client’s message is front-and-centre in all relevant coverage. For instance, a security client could hijack new threats or major breaches; a data centre client could hijack new technologies and developments in the market; and God willing, one day I’ll have a client who can give hard-hitting views on the status of public art in Chesham, Bucks. However, for the meantime, events such as the Budget provide plenty of juicy opportunities.

To be honest, news hijacking tends to be one of my favourite parts of the job. The fact that you need to spot the story, race to complete comment and then convince the press that it's worth covering before waiting for the hopeful deluge of coverage, all give a level of immediacy and excitement that doesn't compare to other activities that will tend to be much more slow-burning. Of course, your average hijack isn't just a matter of clicking your fingers and waiting for coverage. There's a lot of work that has to go into a successful hijack, preventing the risk that, after all the drafting and chasing and pitching, the result in terms of coverage is a big, fat old duck egg. With that in mind, here are the first of my top tips for making sure your news hijack is more Die Hard and less Toy Soldiers.

Know what’s happening

It may seem trite, but the only way to hijack news is by knowing what the news actually is. This means monitoring for breaking stories. These could be announcements from analysts, the Government or other authorities; or stories that have just started to smolder in the news. Regardless, the more you know about a story in advance, the better your response can be. For instance, last month’s budget was a prime opportunity to comment on the tech-related elements that were bound to emerge – whether that meant investment in broadband, regional expansion or brand new Government IT projects. This meant keeping a close eye on developments; from seeing what elements of the budget, such as the abolition of the annual tax return, were trialled in advance, to monitoring the speech and responses to pick out every single relevant titbit.

Know what your client can say 

Of course, when monitoring the news, you can spot the most incredible, man-bites-dog story ever. However, if your client can only talk about dog-bites-man then its relevance swiftly disappears. It’s another truism of PR that knowing your clients is crucial. When news hijacking, it means you can quickly identify the precise stories clients can comment on and, just as importantly, what they can say. A major trailed part of the budget was the decision to abolish the tax return in favour of a new online system. Thanks to knowing our clients, we knew what they could say on this new Government IT project whether it was on the ongoing march of digitalisation, dealing with the complexities such a huge undertaking could entail, or the need for adequate planning and understanding to avoid (yet) another Government IT sob story.

That’s all for part 1 of this blog. In part 2, we’ll cover how to turn that knowledge, of the story and the client, into red-hot action.