Marketing Schwag, ie. giving away free branded material, is by no means a new marketing technique. Still most companies are all but creative in their approach of giving away schwag. In fact, most businesses barely manage to give anything other than pens, shirts and other clothing pieces. While most people will take these items, the large majority will never wear a company shirt more than once. Below is video about some decent marketing schwag from Mobile Paw Spa. (click here to watch video)

The number on thing you can possibly do is give away free branded schwag that people will use or sport daily. I really wanted to get these LED flashlights that were the size of a business card and give them away as my personal business cards. Who would possibly throw something like that away? Now they would have a fully functional miniature flashlight in their wallet or purse. Maybe I will someday.

Let’s say I owned a large sporting goods store and wanted to get more people talking about my business in the long term. I would give away a car GPS to anyone who purchased $x,xxx from the store. But on the schway GPS, I would program popups to mention whenever they were within range of one of the stores across the country.

There are a ton of differnet ways to give away useful and effective marketing schwag for your business or cause. Open up the creativity and let it ride on something worthwhile. It would be better to give away 1,000 whatevers to people who are the talkers vs. 10,000 four-color fliers to random people who don’t care about your products or services.

This is a post about nothing really in particular, but just in case you weren’t sure if I were a nerd or not, I now have proof. (link to videos)

Proof I am a nerd and will travel

In the above video, my car is decorated with an @TheRealJosh Twitter decal from custom-vinyl-lettering.net. I spent some time finding a company that could do the custom car decals, and they seemed the easiest to use and priced very well.

And now for some jets

The Blue Angels are in Fargo, ND, for the Airsho and were buzzing over my house all morning making all kinds of amazing, awesome ruckus that I just had to film and share with you all.

I recommend hooking up the sound system and cranking the bass, just like my mom did with the movie Top Gun in the opening 2 mins of the movie with the Kenny Loggins rockin your face off Danger Zone. Here nor there, the jets made me feel like a little kid running out in the field with my camera trying to capture their pure awesomeness as they maneuvered about. Enjoy.

Random awesome links

Also, if you haven’t seen Allyn Hane from bloggerillustrated.net impressions of Darren Rowse Problogger (spoof) or Gary Vaynerchuk (spoof) you must check them out. So funny!

This is more or less just a few random thoughts I had on the future of vlogging or video blogging. Soon, technology will be to the point were you can watch these sorts of videos on cell phone and other mobile devices. As soon as people can take, upload and watch video all from their cell phones we’ll see a huge explosion of vlogging. Might as well get used to it and start preparing for it, vlogging is here to stay. Not to mention it is much harder to steal other people’s content when your face is the one distributing it. Cheers.