Marketing has to be one of the most frustrating activities in the business world. Effectiveness is so hard to measure, costs can easily get out of control, yes it is absolutely essential for success. The fundamental problem is and always will be: How do you make sure that prospective customers know about you at a time when they're receptive to buying?

We're tried a number of different marketing activities over the past two years since we were founded, always trying to stay within very tight budgetary constraints. Sometimes that means that we don't do as much marketing as we know we need to, making the sales process more frustrating.

Our business involves measuring the quality of customer service. Since we started, we've noticed an interesting cocktail party phenomenon. It goes something like this:

New Acquaintance: So, what do you do?

Me: I run a startup company. We measure the quality of companies' customer service.

NA: Really? I know someone you should talk to, let me tell you about what happened to me when I called XYZ company....

At which point, the New Acquaintance launches into a long and passionate story about the terrible treatment he or she received at the hands of XYZ company, and how he or she will never buy from XYZ again, and so forth. There's a huge zeitgeist here: Everyone knows that customer service is terrible at most companies. Nobody knows what to do about it except get angry and threaten to take their business elsewhere (if they can).

The problem for us has always been that it does us no good to just know who has bad service. We can't call up a prospect cold and say, "We know your service stinks, and we can measure exactly how far it pegs the Stink-o-Meter." This is doubly frustrating when we know that XYZ has just spend millions on installing a new customer service system, and it still stinks because they never addressed the real problems.

For the longest time, we viewed this cocktail party phenomenon as amusing at best, irritating at worst.

Then, the idea: Why can't we use this zeitgeist for marketing? Even if the people telling us stories aren't the ones we need to market to, maybe there's a way to turn all this pent-up anger into name recognition for us as a company.

After some brainstorming, we decided to run an online contest to find the worst customer service story around. Finalists would be posted to our website for people to vote on. Advantage: Cheap, and we might get a lot of exposure. Disadvantage: The exposure wouldn't necessarily be among our clients. But....there's always a chance we might get picked up in a general business press, one of the industry rags, or get seen by someone in a position to improve service somewhere.

So, we put together the technical infrastructure for an online essay contest, and soft launched it yesterday evening. We sent an E-mail announcement to our approximately 43,000 survey takers.

Within 12 hours, we had 210 entries. That's an order of magnitude or more than we had been expecting at first.

This is not the marketing attention we need yet, of course, but it confirms our suspicion that there's a deep well of interest that we can tap into here. The key to success will be to make sure we can associate our name with the idea of improving customer service.

The next steps will come in a few weeks, when we post the first stories to the contest website, and have an official contest launch. We don't know what to expect yet, but from early indications, we've hit on a source of considerable energy and interest.

Now we just have to find a way to turn it into revenue.