Flattery Will Get You Everywhere

By Chester Campbell

I’ve always heard that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I’ve decided to flatter that upstart browser known as Mozilla Firefox. Have you read about the marketing campaign they’re doing for the launch of Firefox 3.5 today? It’s billed as “the fastest Firefox ever” and they’re out to knock our socks off worldwide with a buzz event called “Shiretoko Shock.”


My answer is a campaign for the re-launch of The Surest Poison 1.0 (that’s number one in the Sid Chance series). There’s no doubt that it’s the fastest-paced Chance mystery yet. My buzz event is called “Awe Shocks” (pronounced “aw shucks”).

Borrowing again from Firefox, here’s what you and all my other millions of fans need to do. Tomorrow, on July 1, set your alarm for 1:00 p.m., which corresponds to The Surest Poison 1.0. If you use the 24-hour clock, that’s 1300. At precisely 1:00 p.m. CDT, the Awe Shocks will start in Nashville and move westward around the world. When it’s 1:00 p.m. in your local time zone, you’ll tweet away on Twitter, fiddle around on Facebook, space out on MySpace, blog, flog, whatever, making sure all mankind knows about that great new Nashville mystery.

When the round robin makes its way across the globe and back to Nashville 24 hours later, we’ll touch off the Super Awesome Shock. At precisely 1:00 p.m. CDT on Thursday, July 2, everybody around the world will inundate the web with blogs and tweets and posts and whatever else you can think of to cap off this massive rally. Don’t forget, it all happens at:

Thursday, July 2—
• 2:00 PM Eastern (New York)
• 12:00 PM Mountain (Denver)
• 11:00 AM Pacific (San Francisco)
• 8:00 AM Hawaii (Honolulu)
• 7:00 PM London
• 10:00 PM Moscow

Friday, July 3—
• 3:00 AM Tokyo

Get ready to howl!

Incidentally, if you haven’t seen the Firefox plan, click here.