This Is Viral Marketing!

Seth Godin tells about a company called customInk in his blog. Seems he had ordered some T-shirts from them, and soon afterward he received a note from someone named Lori at customInk saying:

I noticed that you have designed shirts that appear to be for a charity event. If that’s the case, CustomInk would love to make a small donation to your team or to the charity itself onc your behalf. Please let me know if your order is for one of these events. If you would like us to pitch in and support your cause, please include information about your charity event, a link if you have one or the organization’s name if there is no link to a team web page.

This is a low cost way for customInk to please a customer so much that he tells everybody about them.  And if the customer is Seth Godin, literally thousand know about it. (I use Newsgator, and Seth has nearly 3,000 subscribers on that one newsreader alone.) But he points out that, "It turns out that customInk does this as a matter of course, regardless of whether the customer has a blog or not. They don't do it as an inducement, they just do it."

Next time I need to order T-shirts or recommend a source to a client, guess who gets my recommendation.  customInk, of course!