digitalv - 1:25 pm on Mar 3, 2011 (gmt 0)

That doesn't make sense to me ... why should the OP develop a promotion that encourages the very activity he's uneasy about?

It doesn't encourage it, it turns it around. Explain to the visitors what's been happening (and it probably only happened once), and how dumb it is that people would weld stuff to shoes. Flip it around and attract an audience who will buy them for another reason: to weld dumb crap on the front, making fun of it.

There are people out there who love stuff like this. After the initial Obama Mania wore off and he started slipping in the polls, companies selling that Obama coin you saw on TV had tons of them and no one was buying. But in the end, the real sales figures came from people who didn't like Obama. Someone started a site where they encouraged people to buy the obama coin, destroy it, and upload the video to a site. The site didn't stay online very long, but it created a huge surge of sales for all of the companies selling Obama coins in the meantime. I know at least one company selling that coin sold more coins to the tea party types than they did to the Obama fans.