Content Marketing Exercise at the Fortune Leadership Forum

It’s more challenging than ever to get your product, service and ideas noticed in today’s media-drenched environment.

Earlier this month DAVID MEERMAN SCOTT was asked to address this issue in his talk to the Fortune Leadership Summit in Orlando.  Organizers also asked him to include an interactive exercise and since he was speaking about real-time – he created a real-time exercise on Newsjacking (which is the art and science of injecting your ideas into a breaking news story to reach buyers directly and generate tons of media coverage http://www.newsjacking.com/).  The content marketing exercise was a great hit.

Less than 24 hours earlier, Tom Brady and the Patriots were given news of the NFL’s ruling.  The #deflategate story was at that very moment one of the biggest stories in the U.S. with over 2,000 media outlets covering the news. David had the 75 tables (each with 8 or so people) to devise a way to newsjack the story and promote one of the companies represented at their table.

This was no mere academic make-work exercise. It actually produced usable strategies for many of the organizations. In fact, at least three groups actually implemented the strategy that they devised within the next hour. David Tweeted about those first three – take a look below.  He also wrote a blog post about it here. (Don’t get sensitive on me sports fans – not taking sides – just pointing out great execution of real-time communication strategies!):

• Canadian Outback Adventures assured Tom Brady his family would be safe with them.  They’d have the raft properly inflated –https://twitter.com/dmscott/status/598399486025723904
• Florida Institute of Technology promised to be on the sidelines checking for proper inflation – https://twitter.com/dmscott/status/598399264453189632
• College Football Hall of Fame gift shop actually called their shop mid-exercise and had them deflate footballs, put them in a  display and take a photo.  It took 10 minutes to execute! https://twitter.com/dmscott/status/598227316293148672

After the speech conference organizer Verne Harnish, the Fortune conference organizer, emailed David to say “They absolutely loved your presentation — thanks for making it “real-time.”

How will you use content marketing in real-time to grow demand for your products, services or ideas?