Local St. Louis Company Specializes in "Viral Marketing."

It used to be called guerilla marketing. Guerilla marketing was a kind of shady way for folks without much of a marketing budget to get their message across, at least locally. You could spend a few Sunday mornings inserting your ad into a few copies of the weekend newspaper. Got a book to plug? Leave a few copies in the restroom of busy places like the airport or bus station. Has your garage band just come out with a new CD? A few well-placed stickers on busses and the windows of record stores might just do the trick. Leave a stack of flyers at the metro link station, or if you’re really bold, hit the parking lots of a few Wal-Marts and place your ad on the car windshields. You might get busted for littering, but there’s a risk in every form of advertising. Another effective way to get noticed was to talk about your product on message boards and discussion groups, acting like you are a consumer who has found something so good that they just have to talk about it. To a message board for music fans: “Has anyone heard the new CD by the Hedgehogs? The CD is hard to come by, but I got my copy at Cedric’s music store in Seattle, and boy does it rock!” One enterprising young man placed his book on the “greatest books by local authors” shelf at his local library. That was of course, after he called and asked them to order a copy.