Here is an example from the launch of the very first iPhone in 2001. Spanning Sync v1.0 to Support iPhone. They were hoping for pickup by search engines over a decade ago.

One could argue that newsjacking (also referred to as coattail PR) dates back to 1929 (and earlier). Bernays’ stunt called “torches of liberty” involved getting women to march in the NYC Easter Parade smoking cigarettes. It was taboo for women to smoke in public, until that day. The stunt coattailed the news event that Bernays knew would be covered by that day’s media. It even spread through word-of-mouth from spectators sharing the gossipy meme. Yes, different era, with no internet, yet it achieved the same purpose. People always sought out gossip … just in different ways.

The difference today is really the enabling technology involved and how people find news, not the strategy. The tactics are merely carried out differently, too. Same process.

My point, of course, was not to debate newsjacking in its current form. I do agree with you that it is an evolving practice. The GolinHarris example of The Bridge is a great example. They are still riding coattails in their newsjacking efforts.

I really sought to differentiate between good and bad practice in newsjacking / coattail PR.

David, you do agree that there are right ways and wrong ways to select the stories you use (forgive me this term) as a hook, don’t you?

While you may have been doing things similar to Newsjacking for years, what changed recently is that Google now indexes in real-time. That allow a timely blog post to be seen by journalists as they search for more information on a topic. Real-time is the key here. Yet nearly all PR people are in campaign mode rather than real-time mode, so those like us who understand newsjacking have an advantage.

David

Thanks for your comment. Here’s my blog today on this subject. –Jack

Blog:
PRSA Dues Confab July 27; Non-Members Barred—O’Dwyer
Dues Debate Bars Non-Members; We Have Questions
Assembly delegates of PR Society of America have been invited to take part in discussion of the proposed $30 dues hike Wednesday, July 7 at 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. EDT.
Only Society members are allowed on the call. Others face prosecution for “hacking” or “eavesdropping,” a crime.
The Society’s teleconferencing service tracks phone numbers of all who access the call.
However, there’s nothing to stop members from recording the call and/or reporting what happened to the press.
This is a “Keystone Cops” attempt to stifle much needed press coverage of the Society’s finances.
The worst part is that there is a teleconference at all rather than leaders and staff facing members and the press in-person.
Ideal place for this would be New York, which has not only the single biggest chapter in one city (650 members) but four PR trade publications and many thousands of PR pros.
Leaders/staff are not only in flight from the press but from their own members.
The bylaws re-write of 2009 and last year’s debate on allowing non-APRs to run for office were conducted electronically. Leaders never faced any chapter memberships in person.
Participants Will Be Ill-Informed, Timid
If past experience holds, no more than a couple of dozen delegates out of several hundred will show up and they will be ill-informed and timid in their questioning.
They would never dream of asking the questions we would ask which are:
–Bill Murray, what are your pay/fringes for 2010-11 and do you have a new contract? What is it? Why do you make us wait two years to find out your compensation?
–Society revenues declined from $12.2M in 2007 to $10.5M in 2010, a 14% drop, but pay/fringes rose 7.6% to $5,529,699 in 2010 (52% of revenues) from $5,135,245 in 2007. Pay/fringes rose 8% in Q1 this year to $1,390,314 or 57% of revenues of $2,249,824. Such staff costs are around 35-40% of revenues for similar-sized groups, right?
–As for staff, why can’t we see the names and contact points of all 55 or so any more? Only seven are now listed.
–Can’t we have back the single list of 110 chapter presidents? This has cut down on interaction among presidents.
–Why aren’t chair Rosanna Fiske and staffers facing chapter memberships for in-person questioning on the dues hike? Is it true that Rosanna has only addressed one chapter membership so far—Miami, her own?
Audit Chair Is Not on Board
–You say you are “committed” to Sarbanes-Oxley. But that demands that the audit chair be on the board and audit chair Cheryl Ball is not. How do you explain that? She doesn’t seem to have the required financial expertise. Her website mentions an NASD test when that was succeeded by FINRA four years ago.
–Cornell University’s free and secure e-mail voting system has been used more than 60,000 times by groups. Why doesn’t the Society use it for the dues increase, electing officers and board and many other purposes? Your bylaws re-write committee wanted direct elections.
–Are you again going to withhold IRS Form 990 from the Assembly? It has the pay of the top eight staffers. It’s not available in convenient electronic form until early the next year, making members wait two years for such information. Initial deadline was May 15. What is the holdup since your audit came out in April?
–What possible excuse do you have for either not broadcasting the Assembly live or at least making a recording of it available?
–Can’t members have back a transcript of the Assembly which they had for decades until 2005?
Legal Costs Zoom
–Do we need all this legal work–$124,016 in 2009 after $98,865 in 2008 for a total of $222,288 in just two years? You are withholding the legal costs for 2010. The bylaws re-write was not done according to Robert’s Rules because all articles were not presented to the Assembly. Also, proxies were used when the Society satisfied New York State’s demand for a specific rule against proxies by adopting RR. Wasn’t this bad lawyering?
–You have the “Business Case for PR.” Why isn’t anyone from the staff or elected leadership out pitching it?
–Please tell us why you won’t even discuss the possibility of a PDF for the members’ directory? This would be cheap to put together, would be up-to-date, and would not cost the Society anything in printing or mailing. PR professors have pleaded for this since it was a great aid to students in their job-seeking.
–Why can’t we have some senior members at h.q. who are loyal to the membership and who can see how our money is being spent? This would be far superior to any audit or financial reports that could be made, right? The major professional groups (ABA, AMA, AICPA, etc.) all have many of their own professionals on staff and are all headed by one of their own professionals, right? They all have at least two “assembly” meetings a year and all defer about half of their dues, right? Aren’t we oddballs among “professional” associations?
Where is Delegates List?
–Your notice of this teleconference says Assembly delegates “need to be named by August 16, 60 days prior to the meeting.”
So there is no “Assembly” until 60 days before it meets. Members have no national list of representatives until then. Also, that list is only available to delegates and not all of them are on it. It’s a voluntary list. What kind of a “democracy” is this? The delegates don’t even represent the membership since only 18% of members are APR and three-quarters of the delegates are APR.
The previous bylaws said delegates were elected by Dec. 1 of the previous year and served throughout the year. The list of such delegates was available to members and the press until 2005.
Current bylaws say “The term of office of all elected delegates, except chapter delegates, shall be one year beginning Jan. 1 or until their successors are elected.”
So members or the press would have to call up 110 chapters to find out when they elected their delegates.

This is not just a battle between the PR Society and us but between PRS, PR Week/U.S. and the Council of PR Firms and us. They’re all allies and they all give us short shrift.

This is just normal cut-throat business which your students will find once they enter the business world. I don’t think there is any more ethics in PR than there is in any other business.

It’s competition, pure and simple–a rough and tough business.
PRS robbed us of lots of money because our NL in the early 1990s was $175 a year and PRS info packet volume was 3,800. If all 3,800 purchased our NL instead of reading us via PRS we would have had $665,000 more in income each year.

So the Society, angered at our very public fight against their copying practices, went to the U.K. twice (president John Beardsley and COO Ray Gaulke) to urge Haymarket, U.K.’s biggest publisher, to come here and start PRW/U.S. (which it did in 1998).

The first year or so of circulation of PRW/U.S. was PRS’s membership list. How’s that for interference in the free market? Steven Pisinksi, 2000 PRS president, castigated Gaulke for doing that but Gaulke brushed him off like a fly at a picnic. Staff runs PRS!

Surprise, surprise, in 1998 the ad/PR conglomerates and a few independent PR firms started the Council of PR Firms.

The Council served as a conduit for funds from the congloms to PRW/U.S., putting at least $150,000 in ads in PRW/U.S. while in the same period it gave our magazine one $700 ad.

Nasty, nasty! Bald favoritism by a tax-free assn. that was supposed to support its entire industry.

When we demanded some equal treatment by the Council (which currently has $822,000 in cash/savings–latest Form 990), it said it had no more marketing money and stopped ads in PRW rather than give us any.

Talk about lying? What was that.

So PRS is in bed with PRW which is in bed with the Council of PR Firms which is an asset of the five big ad congloms (which give more than half the dues to the Council).

This is what’s going on. Those three PR institutions just don’t like a free press like us and do everything all the time to damage us.

PRW “dumped” thousands of directories of PR firms on the market up until last year, severely hurting sales of our Dir. of PR Firms.

It gave away its $249 directory as part of a $198 sub to PRW, breaking the USPS rule that a premium may be no more than 70% of the cover price of the periodical being sold.

I brought a bunch of documentation to the USPS which audited PRW/U.S. and forced it to take the $249 price off the directory. This is one big reason PRW/U.S. went monthly last June.

Cut-throat and even illegal practices are the norm in business and I don’t see much difference in the PR industry although the PR Society says ethical practice is the most important duty of members.

Tiffany