For small companies starting out, one of the most important things to have, other than a great product or service, is a strong brand. The largest companies in the world spend billions of dollars a year to build or maintain their brand supremacy. It isn’t easy to establish your brand, but sometimes a few simple steps can help; I’m going to look at one of these steps, and analyze the effectiveness of giving away promotional materials (swag) for the remainder of this post.

Case Study of Promotional Advertising and Branding: Geni.com

After mentioning a great new company called Geni.com in a previous blog post, (Geni has become the place to go for family social networking) I was contacted by the company. As a result of their email, I wrote a post about the power of effective follow-up in marketing, where I talked about how following up with your users/customers is essential. The company told me they’d send some free swag because I’m such a fan (and because it is a great branding opportunity) and I promised to do a final wrap-up post if the company came through and sent me some cool stuff.

Did they ever! They came through with flying colors, shipping me (via Fedex, no less) a mousepad, pens, stickers, a baseball hat, and 2 t-shirts.

Think it’s just a cheap ploy? Lets look at what the result of sending me the swag will be:

• As you can tell, I look good in that shirt! I’m definitely going to sport it around town, providing a lot of really cheap branding for Geni.
• When I tell my friends about the site, I’m sure to mention the stuff they sent me and I’ll certainly use words like “cool” and “check it out”.
• I’m now writing the 2nd post completely devoted to Geni and how they are smart in their marketing. This provides the company with even more publicity.
• I’ll probably give the stickers away to some local kids because I have no real use for them. This is great for the company because kids love stickers and they are sure to put them somewhere interesting and visible.

All in all, giving away promotional materials is a smart, inexpensive, and effective way to help build the strength of your brand.

I cannot explain how pissed off I am at my Microsoft Outlook. I have been battling for 40 hours now to get my email working properly but leave it to Gates & Co. to screw something else up . . .

The Beginning
This problem all started when I decided that it was time to become a Phase 3 Web Success. My server has been stretched thin and there was a need to upgrade. I had been experiencing a lot of downtime over the past few months and couldn’t wait any longer. Two nights ago we set out to make the move and completed the server transfer. Understand first that I’m very happy with my new Intel Xeon processor and 15k SCSI drives. This thing is FAST! The issue is that in moving my data to the new server, I also moved all email files . . . which brings us back to:

The Problem
You would think that Outlook would recognize that it had already downloaded the email messages on this new server, but that would be too easy. Apparently, the program has a need to duplicate all old messages previously downloaded before letting me get my new emails. While this is nothing but a royal pain, it only gets worse. First, I’ve got close to 10,000 emails on the server. After going through my virus scans the total download time is counted in hours. Second, Windows XP has decided that it would make things even worse for me and has failed 4 times now prior to completion.

Back to Outlook . . . one would think that if the program downloaded 9,700 emails and crashed, it would realize where it left off and continue from there next time. That would be asking too much. I’m now receiving message 2316 2317 on my 5th try. I’m crossing my fingers in hopes that I don’t get screwed once again.

The fun part will come when I need to go back and remove the 4 duplicate messages for each original message that made it back to Outlook.

The Solution
If anyone has a solution for this email hell, please let me know. Meanwhile, I’ll be sitting here ripping my remaining hair out one by one. I’m one last screw up away from moving everything to Thunderbird.

(Note: I’ve had it with Windows machines and can’t wait to get my next computer – a PowerMac)