Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University.  This week, Thorne talks about the PR opportunities available for quick-acting retailers.

Sunday's Super Bowl and the concurrent lack of foot traffic through the store (which stands to figure, given that a bit over one hundred and eleven million of us will watch at least part of the Super Bowl today.  The last three Super Bowls have been the most watched programs on television, ever), got me thinking about David Meerman Scott's recently released book, Newsjacking.

As Scott defines it, Newsjacking is a form of public relations, quickly responding to, or as he puts it hijacking breaking news by doing PR in response to quickly breaking news that calls attention to your own store or business.  Some recent examples of newsjacking involve:

Wynn Resorts, after Paris Hilton got herself arrested in Las Vegas, issued a press release banning the reality star/heiress from the company’s properties along the Las Vegas Strip.

After actress Kate Winslet saved billionaire Richard Branson's mother during a recent fire, the London Fire Brigade quickly offered to train Winslet as a firefighter.

We've done similar things at the local level in response to news stories.  When a story ran in the local papers about the starting of a Zombie Walk in town, we issued a press release declaring ourselves a "Zombie Friendly Store," offering safe haven and free items left over from Free Comic Book Day and Free RPG Day to all participants in the Zombie Walk.

On a more serious issue, when stories ran in the local newspaper about the difficulties the local food pantry was having keeping its shelves stocked, we offered discounts and prizes to customers that brought in canned food (in fact we still do).  The got picked up by the local papers; we received a mention in a follow-up story; and collected over 30 cases of food for the pantry.

So how does this tie in with the Super Bowl?  Well, the commercials always equal the actual game itself in terms of interest.  In past years, Super Bowl commercial have been kept tightly under wraps but that appears to have gone by the wayside as most of them have already gone up on You Tube or other social media sources.  The most popular of them so far has been the two and a half minute homage to the movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off, promoting the Honda CR-V.  The Twitter hashtag for the commercial is #dayoff and, when I checked a few days ago, there were over 20,000 tweets using that hashtag.  The #Reinvented hashtag for the Toyota Camry's Super Bowl commercial has gotten a similar number of tweets.

What to do with these?  Tyler Goodrige, writing on Entrepreneur's Daily Dose blog, suggests tying into the fanfare about the commercials by using their hashtags to promote in store sales or specials, posting an offer tied into the hashtag on the store website or Facebook page, then redeeming the offer when a customer adds the hashtag to an placed on the store's website, or giving a discount when the customer comes into the store and mentioned the hashtag.

Of course successful newsjacking does require keeping up on breaking news and reacting to it quickly, so it is a bit late to take advantage of Super Bowl buzz.  However, we do have the new season of The Walking Dead starting next week and a plethora of gaming (and comic) related media releases coming out this spring and summer.  Keep an eye out for them and be prepared to newsjack (a new term for an old promotional method) 'em.

The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.