ChasNote

That’s the headline someone used for a story posted to Digg. (Admittedly it’s been Dugg only once, and Marc Ecko’s first name is actually spelled with a C.) But the story of Marc Ecko buying Barry Bonds’s 756th homerun ball for $750,000, marking it with an asterisk and sending it to the Baseball Hall of Fame has me thinking the exact opposite about Mr. Ecko. I’m convinced Marc Ecko is a genius of conversational marketing.

What does Ecko get for his $750,000? Well, for starters, 10 million people (maybe a bit fewer, you could vote multiple times) went to his site to vote on what he should do with the ball. And just now I searched for “marc ecko” + “barry bonds” and Google returned 88,600 results. At least a handful of the stories I read call Ecko some variation of an idiot, but almost every one tells readers — in the first paragraph — that Marc Ecko is a fashion designer. That can’t be all bad.