[Warning: If you like cats and/or have strong feelings about animal cruelty you might be shocked by part of this story.]

The first time I started a company I spend a lot of time writing a press-release. On the day we launched I faxed the press release to a few newspapers, relevant magazines and websites. I hoped the press-release would get picked up and make us famous. I was hoping for a spark to start my media engine. And it did.

These days things are different.

Sure, I would still write a press-release but just a spark isn’t enough to start an online business and attract millions of users. What you need is (a great product or service and) a Burning Cat Strategy.

When I was in college there were a lot of fires in the city where I lived. Every month a shop that wasn’t doing very well burned down in an effort to collect money from the fire insurance. Most of the time they failed because the investigators, by looking at the source of the fire, could easily show it wasn’t an accident.

But then a strange thing happened. The investigators suddenly were confronted by fires that seemed to have started everywhere in the room. The whole room seemed to have caught fire at once. After a few months of similar fires the investigators started to notice one similarity in all those unexplainable fires; they always found a dead cat.

It turned out that the arsonists poured gasoline over the cats and used them as living torches. The burning cats would run around the store and spread the fire everywhere in seconds.

Cruel but effective.

You are now thinking ‘Who comes up with such a cruel thing’ and the answer might surprise you. Forrest fires and often spread by burning rabbits and other animals and sometimes fires are spread from one house to another by a burning mouse that tries to escape to the house next door.

These criminals probably just watched National Geographic.

I thought of this story as I was trying to explain the marketing strategy of my own company and other internet companies like us. We can’t rely on a single spark to get us noticed. To start our fire we need a Burning Cat.

We use a blog to get users interested before we launch, promise journalists a first look at the beta, talk with potential users, give speeches at universities, design affiliate services, tools for webmasters, collect email-addresses for the beta program, organize a conference and do a whole range of other things to make sure that when we go live we are everywhere.

Even this post is part of my ‘Burning Cat Strategy’!

I’m coining the term and hope you will use it too and if you blog about it, please make sure you mention Fleck.com and this blog.

We need all the sparks we can get…