Two More Attention Strategies

Since I’ve noticed a fair amount of interest in blogging publicity strategies, here’s a couple more to study.
First up is The $39 Experiment: Asking Random Companies for Stuff. Started by a guy named Tom Locke, the site is about Tom using 100 stamps to send 100 letters (total cost, $39) asking major corporations for free stuff. His letters are humorously patronizing, and it’s worth a visit just to read some of his faux allegiance to consumer products.
Bashing and exposing the poor marketing and customer service practices of big companies is a no-brainer in the blogosphere. So Tom has picked up two links from Steve Rubel and one today from Seth Godin. Not bad. Let’s hope Tom has bigger plans than the AdSense Ads he has slapped up there.
By the way, I just checked . . . bigcompaniessuck.com is still available, so go start that killer corporate-bashing blog before Wal-Mart ties up the domain (this is a joke, but I expect the domain to be gone by end of business today).
Next up is John Scott’s new blog. Scott is no stranger to online promotion — he’s the man behind the v7ndotcom elursrebmem search engine competition. He launched his blog with a somewhat ambiguous $10,000 prize for his readers, which has morphed into a campaign to encourage linking to non-A-List blogs.
The money’s nice, but it’s the potential meme that’s the juice here. Liz Strauss of Successful Blog and I had a similar discussion about harnessing the power of the so-called Magic Middle, a huge group of bloggers with more collective power than the A-List could ever dream of.
The trick is, how do you get us all together? C-List, M-List, Z-List, and every other letter there is. We’ll even let nice A-Listers play.
Well, to start, we link to everyone that we read and that impresses us. And there’s a growing movement (which John Scott is a part of) to bring back the blog roll, after the trend seemed to be going in the other direction.
I’m going to add one myself just as soon as Chris Pearson, my talented but currently swamped template designer, comes up for air. Remember people, it’s up to us to write our own scripts. We don’t need the A-List and we don’t need the mainstream media. We only need to cooperate and recognize those with something to say, regardless of their Technorati rank.