Live from ACCM: When It Pays to Be Stupid May 21, 2007 10:35 PM
, By Melissa Dowling
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Boston--If your Web marketing consultant advised you to title one of your first blog posts "It’s great to be stupid," you might start looking for a new agency. But Steve Spangler, president of science toys merchant Steve Spangler Science, followed the advice of Netconcepts’ Stephan Spencer, and it was pure genius.
Spangler entered the blogosphere in June 2004 after his Website saw a huge spike thanks to a blog post from a site called Boingboing.net. The site had blogged about Insta-Snow, a Spangler product that when mixed with water foams up to create fake snow, and included a link to Steve Spangler Science. Shortly after that, a site called Stupid.com discovered Insta-Snow and highlighted the product for being so, well, stupid. Spanger launched his blog about a month later.
Has the blog boosted business? Already this year, Spangler tells MULTICHANNEL MERCHANT, "we’ve almost tripled sales of Insta-Snow."
Spangler, who with Spencer and Ice.com’s Pinny Gniwisch was a panelist on Monday’s session "Making Blogging and RSS Pay Off," created even more buzz with his blog the next year with his "drop a roll of Mentos into a bottle of Diet Coke" experiment, which creates a 30-ft. geyser of soda spray. That oft-repeated experiment (see You
Spangler is not just an influencer among science Websites: He was named one of
Tube) inspired a new product, Spangler’s $4.95 Geyser Tube, which he introduced at the 2007 Toy Fair.Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2006 in an online poll. At number 18 in the ranking, Spangler is sandwiched in between Howard Stern (#17) and Brad Pitt (#19).
