A quick way to react to media events using social news sites

Reacting effectively to news events from a digital perspective can bring explosive traffic to your domain within a matter of hours. Making sure you have a strategy in place to launch media of you own when a story breaks is crucial…and there are literally hundreds of strategies you can employ.

Here at SEO Sumo, we work diligently to explore and refine digital media strategies founded on the natural strength of social news sites. We’ve learned some tough lessons about getting our articles, linkbait, and press releases in front of the right audience, at the right time.  We’ve learned that relying on a multi prong approach utilizing social media, online news sources, digital PR, and news syndication is a relatively sure fire way to get a few links as long as your timing is right.

As a result of our initial trial and error approach to launching reactionary media, we’ve learned from our mistakes and defined a straightforward methodology designed to help our clients stay on top of breaking news…before their competitors.

I. Keeping tabs on what’s buzzing
There’s a variety of news aggregation portals which can be used to keep tabs on news trends in the digital world. Among the strongest sources are popurls.com, topix.com, huffingtonpost.com, and twittersphere.com . Monitoring the viralvideocharts can also come in handy. You can also gauge the effect of an event as it pertains to web search volume by monitoring the blogosphere through technorati.com, Google Blog Search, and Yahoo Buzz.

When it comes to breaking news…monitoring mainstream news sources like the NYTimes and WSJ while tracking brands with Google Alerts can help uncover excellent media opportunities. So, as a rule of thumb, be sure to monitor the RSS feeds from heavily trafficked online news publications and top blogs from an RSS aggregator like igoogle. That way….you’ll know when news breaks first.

II. Sending out the Story
So you’ve found the trend you want to ride…you’ve got a compelling story developed with the concept of “linkbait” in mind…and you’ve taken the initiative to tag, label, format, and prepare as much of your story as possible to be syndicated across the web.  you’ve also taken the initiative to include a video, podcast compatible mp3, and poling widget. All that’s left is to send everything out into the internet and wait for the links and notoriety to come flooding into your domain. right?

almost!