Watching the Superbowl is an American tradition and this year’s game between the 49ers and the Ravens was no different. What was different about this year’s Big Game, however, was the surprise power outage, which left about half the Superdome in the dark for a half hour.

During the blackout, the social media team for Oreo Cookie took advantage of the unexpected situation and tweeted an ad featuring a simple graphic and the tagline “you can still dunk in the dark.”  The tweet quickly went viral and got over 15,000 re-tweets.

Here’s how Oreo achieved that success and how you can too.

Take advantage of opportunities as they come. The Internet and social media have completely changed the communication landscape—accelerating the pace of media to real-time. With this change, opportunities may now come more frequently, but leave even faster. The window of opportunity to respond can be at best, a day or two or at worst, just a few minutes.

Recognizing opportunities is half the battle of reacting to and exploiting them. What’s an opportunity? What constitutes an opportunity will be different for each company, and not all opportunities need to be on a national or global level, many are very small and quite local.

An example of a local advertiser taking advantage of opportunities is Brad Benson Hyundai in South Brunswick, NJ, the number one Hyundai dealer in the U.S. Though I am not vouching for his creative or production expertise of his radio ads, he does leverage the drama and saga of current events which people seem to like, working in mentions of Lance Armstrong’s PED use and Taylor Swift’s ongoing relationship issues in a recent ad.

You are limited only by your creativity and ability to get the message out there (with a little help from a supportive management team, too). Going back to the Oreo tweet, senior members of Oreo’s marketing team were watching the Superbowl with their digital media agency. With the leadership team sitting together with the creative talent, getting approval for the tweet was a cinch.

Follow Oreo’s example and compress the approval process at your company so you can begin to leverage unexpected opportunities as they happen.