Originally Posted by Babaganoosh

Sorry, this is a little long but worth the read I think:

I was at a bookstore a little while ago and ran into a friend I haven't talked to in a couple of months. We both had a little free time so we decided to go to their little coffee shop and get a cup of coffee and shoot the shit for a little while. When we sat down, I noticed a young woman sitting at a table next to us on her laptop and she had a beginning php book beside her. It's not uncommon to see someone coding in a coffee shop so I didn't give it much thought.

A guy comes along with a newspaper and sits down at another table near us and gets a call on his cell phone. I thought he was an inconsiderate prick at first since he didn't move and I could hear every word of his conversation. He started talking about his websites. He mentions that he coded something on his own, then starts talking about SEO. He mentioned that all of his blogs were on different class c IPs. He said having his sites crosslinked on different class c IPs makes him a lot of money. Then he said "No, it's all the same host. I use xyz host. They set you up with as many different class c IPs as you want. Yeah, of course they support php and mysql. Expensive? Oh, no way. They're only about $30 for 2 class c IPs and you can add as many as you want later. Seriously! Check them out. They are at xyzhost.com. By the way, they are local so you can drop by their office if you want to."

Dickhead...whatever. I finished up talking to my friend and headed to another bookstore to try to find what I was after. As I stood at the computer book shelf and thumbed through books about AJAX, I heard the same guy talking on the aisle next to me and it was the EXACT same conversation. I even quietly said "By the way, they are local so you can drop by their office if you want to" just before he said it. The guy standing next to me looking at books gave me a strange look since I clearly "predicted" what this guy was about to say. I told him that I thought we had just been spammed and I had heard his same fake phone call not more than 30 minutes before at another bookstore.

I put my book down and moved to the aisle where the cell phone spammer was and pretended to be interested in books in that section. As soon as I did, he walked away. He ended the call and I asked him if he just spammed me. He acted surprised at first but after I told him that I was just in the other bookstore and heard that same conversation. I explained that I wasn't pissed, just intrigued. He finally admitted that it's a little bit of guerilla marketing and he's been doing it for quite a while with excellent success. Whenever he sees someone that might be interested in his services, he has his wife call him on his cellphone and goes through the script again. He even applies it to a couple of his other ventures but wouldn't tell me what they are.

Sneaky bastard. Has anyone ever heard of doing this or anything similar? I was annoyed by it at first but the more I think about it, the more it makes sense.