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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.

Does the internet really connect people?

Sadly the man who delivers straw for me is spending Christmas ill in hospital. He delivers for Betty, a fabulous lady farmer who still manages her farm alone & is well into her seventies. A straw delivery arrived today thanks to one of her neighbours, who is in fact in direct competition with her, as he also sells hay & straw to the local equine fraternity. However, in farming circles there has always been a culture of helping each other out, whether that be by loaning machinery or offering a spare pair of hands at shearing or harvest. Today I went to settle my bill & Betty & I were chatting about her generous neighbour. She remarked that he was a lovely lad & that she knew his parents & their parents & no doubt their parents too.

So what has the above got to do with web 2.0? In this always connected 24/7 culture, interaction has never been so easy. We can connect & communicate on a global scale but are these relationships of real value? How many of our online associates would be prepared to go out of their way to help us out? Fleeting interactions & business networking does not a community make. Saying that, I've met some fabulous genuine friends as a result of the net but it's all to easy to slip into the habit of tweeting & facebooking instead of meeting face to face. So my 2010 resolution is to treasure real friends & spend more time offline with them!

Rage against the machine

So the power of a well orchestrated facebook campaign & the subsequent picking up of the story by mainstream media has beaten the Simon Cowell X factor junket to number 1. Time for the music industry to learn some lessons in 2010 perhaps?!

Gary Vaynerchuk in London

(photo pinched from @IanSanders - thanks!)

Last week I grabbed the opportunity to see the irrepresible Gary Vaynerchuk speak in London about his new book Crush-it.

There's been some great coverage of the event by other attendees so I won't replicate!

@jas filmed the talk which you can view here http://www.thewebpitch.com/videos/gary-vaynerchuks-talk-the-water-poet-london/

Here's Phil Legetter's take on the real time element of the talk http://blog.caplin.com/2009/12/09/how-real-time-does-real-time-have-to-be/

Ian Sanders talks about the importance of word of mouth here http://scrambledup.blogspot.com/2009/12/word-of-mouth-is-on-steroids.html

For me personally seeing Gary speak with so much passion helped to ram home the concept behind his book (& brand full stop). I eventually made it home to Bristol at 2am & last thing I did was tweet about the talk. Within 2 minutes I had a DM from Gary who was still hustling despite a long day & a 5 hour time difference to adapt to as well. A simple thing but I was impressed! This is one man that really walks the walk.