Inc.com recently ran a great article on Tim O’Reilly.  He’s the guy who founded the company that writes all sorts of computer manuals – if you work with software engineers, chances are you’ve seen their books with a black and white pencil sketch of an animal on the front.

O’Reilly media has gone on to become the company in tech circles for conferences and education resources.  Starting out, he took a different and brilliant approach to launching his company with some clever PR and marketing work…

In 1992, O’Reilly published The Whole Internet User’s Guide & Catalog and, at the last minute, added a chapter about the World Wide Web. At the time, there were roughly 200 websites, none of them run by companies. To market a general-interest book from a small publisher about a relatively obscure topic, O’Reilly devised a novel marketing strategy: He would turn himself into an activist. He hired the former director of activism from the Sierra Club and devised a campaign that treated the adoption of the Internet like the effort to save the rain forests. He mailed copies of the book to every member of Congress and then went on a media tour in New York City and Washington, D.C. “I was saying, ‘The Internet is coming; the Internet is coming,’ ” he says. And O’Reilly Media had the only book that could explain it to you.

The strategy worked brilliantly. Many of the first mainstream newspaper articles about the Internet were pegged to the release of O’Reilly’s book. “Internet Provides Way to Tap Into World of Information,” was the headline in the Chicago Tribune. By the time dot-com fever hit, O’Reilly was the expert in the field. The Whole Internet sold more than a million copies, a huge windfall for the tiny publisher.

You can read the whole article here on Inc.com.

Bonus Points: How can you position your new product or service as a “cause” like O’Reilly did?