Have you heard of the “Indie Virus” yet? Well, you probably will. It’s a strategy that got started in the comment section of this post. One of the commenters suggested this experiment:

On Monday’s episode of The Apprentice, the teams had to get as many people as possible to text message a special keyword in order to promote Gillette”s new (and overhyped) Fusion product line. Obviously, this is essentially an experiment in viral marketing, and it provided me with an interesting bit of thought fodder.

What if a few of us “Magic Middle” bloggers came up with a viral meme of our own? Maybe a tagline that we include in our posts to identify results on Technorati? Can we go to #1 on the search list? Can we start something that temporarily breaks the monotony and brings more exposure to sub A-listers?

How many people could we get involved? The winning team on The Apprentice got 637 people (or somewhere around there) to text message their special keyword in one day, but their approach involved face-to-face, direct techniques.

They are trying to prove that the little guy does have power and I agree. Another commenter:

“As far as blogrolls and other linking strategies being tired just like the A-List, there”s a difference. There’s only 100 of them. There are millions of us. Unless we revert to narrow herd mentality (which is possible) we should have hugely diverse blogrolls that allow for the introduction of unknown bloggers to others, based on our various niches.

It’s a personal recommendation system, not a popularity contest. Show your eclectic taste and populate your blog roll with truly unique selections.”

And this is actually what I was attempting to do with the Blogging Chicks blogroll. I wanted to start a blogroll specific to women but that went beyond genre, so that we could all be exposed to all kinds of writing. And so that we could be noticed and not let the top 100 have all the readers :-). In the movie A Bugs Life the ants realized that together they had the power that they lacked individually to beat up the grasshoppers. Let’s join together to kick some grasshopper butt!
BTW, this isn’t new, the Alliance guys figured this out a long time ago.
Updated to add: I just thought I would add this comment because I should have mentioned this when I orginally posted this. This test is for marketing purposes. These guys want to figure out a way to get their message out there using the blogs to do it.
Tags: Indie Virus, Blogging, Blogs, Blog, Blogroll, Marketing
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