Expert Generated Content
January 19, 2008 – 11:46 am
Over the past year and a half, we’ve done a lot of marketing projects for DeSmogBlog. We feature a few in the book. One which we didn’t write up was The 100 Year Letter Project. From the introductory blurb:
We asked friends of DeSmogBlog to write a letter to their great, great grandchildren about their vision and hopes for their world in 100 years, in the context of global warming. Will we all be underwater? In outer space?
To kick off the project, we contacted some prominent bloggers, climate scientists and writers. We got about a half-dozen letters from these ‘experts’, and those letters became the backbone of the project. That drew some attention, and we since have received a bunch more letters.
Beginning with experts does a few things for you:
- It gives a nascent project instant credibility.
- It may drive traffic if those experts are active elsewhere online and link to the project.
- It can attract mainstream media attention.
The reason I’m writing about The 100 Year Letter Project now is because it was referenced in two different spots–a blog and an article–by The New York Times. That’s terrific, but frankly not necessarily reflective of the project’s relatively low visibility.
In my experience, the media loves big, easy-to-articulate ideas. My odd pop art web projects like Get A First Life and Dear Rockers have received a surprising amount of media attention for this reason. They tell a good story, and make for good sound bytes. The same is true, I think, of the 100 Year Letter Project. Of course, we wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without the letters.
Tags: 100 year letter, attention, desmogblog, experts, mainstream media, pr, UGC
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