I received Seth Godin’s daily update, as I do every morning, and it jumped out at me as an interesting content marketing approach. So instead of sending out preview copies of his new book “Linchpin” to the usual industry suspects he is offering people who receive his daily feed the opportunity to get a copy and review it ahead of it’s launch date. This approach has a great content marketing spin with an online response marketer touch as well.

Seth is providing content in the form of the book but he’s offering it for free to the first 3,000 people who show enough interest to donate to a cause that Seth is supporting called Acumen. So this filter gives him some sense of how serious you are since you need to commit money to a cause to have a chance at a preview copy. Now some might say this is a little scamish, minimum contribution is $30 which is probably the cost of the hard cover book, but it’s giving anyone who signs up a chance to create a review ahead of others which can be valuable to the blogger since they have the opportunity to create fresh original content themselves so the trade off is pretty good, especially if you were going to buy the book at some point anyway.

The advantages for Seth are pretty clear, reduced cost of distributing books to industry types who may never do a review of it, creating buzz ahead of the book launch, and creating PR through people in touch with the newer communication tools (Twitter, Facebook, blogging). What’s also intriguing to me is how in touch Acumen is to this form of campaign to drive contributions at a time when this has been challenging for most non-profits. They have built a mechanism to provide a brand (Seth Godin) an advertising campaign that can promote his product at the same time they promote theirs.

Now I know this isn’t a new approach to some, but what I like is the way they have put this together. They make it very easy for consumer to participate both on Seth’s product and Acumen’s cause, through a simple process to execute the transaction and create a win/win for all participants, including the consumer.

Very cool in my book.