Slipstreaming, Pivoting and Tapping into High Currency Hot Topics

When applied to content and journalism - Slipstreaming is very much the same sort of thing - where you take advantage of the lead a currently popular story has amassed. A cruder way to describe that is 'Headline Hijacking'. This means re-using very closely key words and phrases from a popular leading story. Most News sites aren't particularly geared towards SEO - so after the first week or two - those key terms - which will have evoked a public response and reaction - will kind of be up for grabs.

So you write a similar story - or at least one that starts mostly the same - such that any residual searches for the original headline get directed to your newer article. Once certain words and phrases are in the popular conscience - there is sort of a one month period - when those are particularly 'hot potatoes'.

In advertising we frequently speak of 'talking into someone's listening' - which essentially means you can only properly target audiences based on what their current interests and hot topic trigger points are. Few brands have the luxury of being able to created trends entirely by themselves - which really means you need to leverage and feed off existing current points of interest - which can change fairly rapidly.

You will note that certain campaigns and campaigning topics have more traction than others - and that is typically because those are the current hot topics for your audience - and those are the terms that said audience is actively searching on at a particularly point in time.