I did a online promotional campaign for Peter's new book, Coohunting: Chasing Down the Next Big Thing, written with fellow M.I.T. researcher, Scott Cooper. I was testing a new campaign called "Blog Buddy" that pairs an author with a "blog warrior" for a daily hour of simultaneous phone and high-speed Internet work. It's a guerrilla blogging campaign.

For the Coolhunting campaign we added a risky feature. We decided to make the daily phone call between the blogger and the author public, through FreeConferenceCall.com, so that anyone could listen in. Then we invited journalists to join us on the call.

What we're talking about here is Transparent PR. The PR campaign is conducted in front of a live audience. FreeConferenceCall.com taps out at 100 connections, so for the first two weeks I kept the phone number quiet for fear some journalist would publish it, overload the capacity and crash the program.

Two weeks into the program, we started promoting it to the public as well as the press. My fears of crashing the system were unwarranted -- we never had more than five non-staff on the call. The technology functioned reasonably well, though the user experience was diminished by poor audio and some connectivity problems.

The sessions themselves were a revelation. Our goal was each day to talk about someone doing innovative work, visit their sites and/or blogs, post a review on our blog, post a comment on their blog, and make a personal connection via email or phone. The result far surpassed that goal: over 100 sites visited, reviewed, and blogged in a 20 day period.

In a further nod to transparency, publisher AMACOM Books agreed to make all the promotional and tracking documents public; these are normally internal documents, such as which journalists asked to see the book. They're available on the authors' blog. Patron Saint Productions also put a case history of the campaign, which became available just a couple of weeks ago.

The campaign for "Coolhunting" illustrated a new kind of PR: using site reviews, comments on blogs, and email to connect with journalists and others in an educational discussion. Peter Gloor's recent work is about how effectively people connect in work environments, and why. I hope you'll look at this case history as an example in anticipation of his blog show this week.

STEVE O'KEEFE
Co-Host, "This Week on IAOCblog.com"