“It’s not only chickens and fizzing soda bottles that get the buzz.”

So says Gary Spangler, E-Business Leader, DuPont Electronic & Communication Technologies.

In the MarketingSherpa e-newsletter that landed on me today, I read about Mr. Spangler and his successful use of the blogosphere to promote marketing videos about the advantages of DuPont science called—big stretch—DuPont Science Stories.

Riveting, eh? Well, maybe not to me, but it must have been to the more than fifty thousand viewers who watched them. That number may not rival the biggest viral videos out there, but still, that’s great traffic, and proof that there’s an audience for everything. With smart online promotion you can find them for a heck of a lot less than blasting messages through broadcast media.

To build awareness for their Science Stories, the folks at Dupont took a few very effective (and comparatively inexpensive) steps:

1. Paid promotion on eight blogs, some specifically targeting the science community
2. Posting videos to YouTube, Google Video, and Blip.tv—all free sites
3. Creating their own microsite to also house the videos
4. Showing the videos in a player that let viewers email the link, connect to the player, or paste the video player directly into another blog or website

There are no monetary figures in the articles, but I can imagine those four strategies all run less than just a couple broadcast spots, not to mention the fact that the blog-based campaign was precisely focused on a relevant audience.

Kudos to Mr. Spangler for leveraging the ever-expanding blogosphere’s ability to reach niche audiences. The one question I’d offer is: could it have been done with zero paid advertising?