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Is face to face marketing value for money?

This week I’m in Cologne, Germany & unusually for me I’m away from the computer for most of the day. Twice a year the European equestrian industry gathers at the Spoga Horse trade fair to shop like only horsey women can!

The cost of this kind of marketing activity is high. Many of the companies here have spent 30,000 euros plus on their stand, then there is freight, travel, staffing, accommodation & of course beer to pay for on top.

It seems a bit strange that will all the modern internet technologies available to us, that companies & buyers still travel across the globe to meet in over-priced exhibition venues. Perhaps I’m just grumpy at paying 8euro per hour for internet access?!

I’ve been busy videoing away with my new flip HD cam & the project this year is to integrate more video into the marketing strategy of the equestrian wholesale company I also run alongside Blacktype. It’s a very traditional industry (launching an e-commerce website for trade customers was seen as revolutionary 18 months ago!!) so it will be interesting to see how it goes.

On the subject of the flipcam, I’m delighted with it so far although I’m not sure what everyone in the office thinks as they are being filmed for inclusion on the website.

Thanks to Anna Bruce for the photo. Check out her site at http://www.annabruce.co.uk/ if you would like to find out more about her superstar journalism & copywriting skills.

Customising Your Social Sites

I'm in the middle of a website rebuild for www.blacktypegroup.com at the moment, transferring it all over to wordpress & doing a big content overhaul. It's a fun if somewhat frustrating job at times.

I'm also taking the opportunity to review my overall personal branding strategy & be a bit better at presenting myself. It's very easy to get bogged down in client work & neglect your own!

I'm coming across lots of great articles on the web to do with customising & I will try to add some of the best to this post as I go along.

Creating custom backgrounds for twitter, youtube, myspace

Managing a wordpress website

Essential Word Press Plug-ins

Vitamin Water & Facebook - a lesson to be learnt

This week Vitamin Water announced the winner of their facebook contest to develop a new flavour (see the techcrunch article here for all the details).

The new flavour, "connect", has a facebook inspired name & carries facebook branding on the bottle. Whilst it is interesting & unusual (at least so far) to see a physical product tied up with facebook that's not what I want to focus on in this post.

My first reaction on reading the techcrunch article was to open up facebook & search for the vitamin water page to see what was going on with the brand. (I'm more of a strong coffee kind of girl personally). I used the search button in the top right hand corner of my facebook home page & this is the first result that was returned. On first glance it looks like an official page, but it was set up by a US high school pupil.

The official page is http://www.facebook.com/vitaminwater which doesn't appear anywhere in the search results. As Vitamin Water are spending lots money to promote their facebook page by running the URL in their TV ads etc. this seems like a big oversight.