Hurricane Sandy Media Opportunists

Given most of us are holed up in our apartments today due to Hurricane Sandy, I thought this article was appropriate to discuss:

http://adage.com/article/news/adland-weathering-hurricane-sandy/238030/

The beginning of the article focused on the retailer response to the storm, which I didn't feel was that unexpected, but the more interesting portion of the article was the online media response to Sandy that is discussed later in the article.

Aereo, a NYC DMA service that allows you to watch live broadcast TV online, is offering a free trial for 12 hours.  This is to cater to those NYC users who either lose their cable during the storm or don't have cable, allowing them to watch broadcast updates on the storm.  They promoted this via tweets sent out Monday morning.  I think that is a smart idea to try to entice new users, although I feel their marketing strategy of this promotion was lacking as tweets go to their followers who likely already have the service.  I think a better strategy might have been a local street team approach (since they just need to spread the word in the NYC DMA) on Sunday and Monday before the storm became bad.  They could have briefly set up near grocery stores as people went out to buy last minute water or batteries.  Since the storm was slow moving, they could have planned to execute this street team promotion on a very small level and urged people to tweet about it or Facebook the promotion to their friends to gain some sort of promotion/discount themselves.  They would not look like they were taking advantage of a crisis situation, but rather trying to help people stay informed to those that may lose cable or don't have it.

Besides Aereo, NYTimes and Wall Street Journal took down their paywalls during Sandy to allow free access to coverage for online users.  The paywalls will stay down during the duration of the storm.  This is a good PR move for these channels as people will go on to use them for free and then may be more likely to sign up for their paid model if they like what they see.  Twitter is also pulling together a crisis content hub at twitter.com/hashtag/sandy where it agreed to pull together tweets about the storm from the NYC Mayor's office, FEMA, Red Cross, etc. This allows users that might not go to Twitter to use it for the first time so they can stay informed, which might help expand the user base after the storm is over.

Overall, the internet has become the interactive location for users to get the information in the face of a crisis such as a storm.  That is, until the power goes out :).