Lisa Barone is covering SES NY this week, including an account of keynote speaker David Meerman Scott‘s amazing story:

“Cindy Gordon was launching a new theme park for Universal Orlando resorts. She could have done anything to launch it. She could have hired the best agency. She could have done a Super Bowl ad.  But she didn’t do any of those things. Instead, she told just seven people. She told the seven most popular bloggers. She held a secret midnight web cast where the bloggers got a special code and they were the only people allowed to go.

What happened next?

Those seven bloggers blogged about what was going on. Their followers blogged about it. The media that covered those bloggers covered it. Within 24 hours of telling seven people, 350 million people had heard about the Harry Potter theme park. How cool is that? What we’re all about (all of us, he says), is attention. We’re about generating attention and getting people to pay attention to us.”

I’m sharing this story for several reasons. We can pull at least a couple points worthy of mention from the story.

1. A similar tactic for this particular level of influential bloggers wouldn’t have worked to announce a new shoe or canned food product. This is Universal Orlando and Harry Potter – two recognizable and popular brands worldwide.
2. There’s still an especially insightful strategy to glean from Cindy’s approach. You may not work for a brand like Universal or promote a product like Harry Potter, but you can scale this idea to fit many other products and services.
3. Some news pieces grow faster as grass roots movements than big bright traditional advertising pieces. Bloggers especially love to share news that scoops traditional media.

Know Your Brand’s Level of Influence

It may require some study or outside consulting, but you can implement this tactic if you know the level of influence and interest your brand holds (or could potentially hold when the news gets out). You might not get TechCrunch, LifeHacker, The Huffington Post, Gizmodo, Mashable, or Boing Boing to cover your news event, but somewhere out there lies the perfect type of blogger with the right level of influence and interest. Anyone would want insider info about the new Harry Potter theme park. That’s so big it’s guaranteed to drive traffic to even the big blogs. But even a smaller scale announcement has an audience. It’s time to find yours.

Finding That Balance

The point is to select bloggers who aren’t too big to not care about your brand announcement, but who also aren’t too small to matter. You want to find bloggers who will benefit from being on the inside AND who also have enough influence and readership to move the buzz needle.

It’s a trickle down method, so you don’t need to contact everyone and their dog with a industry-related blogspot account. You want the bloggers those bloggers read.

Don’t Experiment Too Much

Discerning that balance of interest and influence may take a little experimentation, but keep in mind that the above scenario worked partly because of its exclusivity. Seven bloggers getting a scoop are more likely to take the bait than 70. That’s too much competition, and many of those 70 will be lesser bloggers who would read and promote the news anyway once it’s been announced by the tier above them.

So, which bloggers are compatible with YOUR brand?