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« Braving the tides of mercurial 2010 | Main | I bid you adieu, my dear Rad on the Web »
Wednesday
Mar242010

The best things in life are free at Swagapalooza

DateWednesday, March 24, 2010 at 10:29AM

Last night, I had the opportunity to attend an "un-conference" called Swagapalooza. I was attending on behalf of Justin.tv as we were providing their live stream so viewers could enjoy the conference from home.

In essence, Swagapalooza is about giving any product creator their 15 minutes of fame in a room full of bloggers. From Bacon Hot Sauce to the Joby GorillaPod, there was an expanse of innovations discussed. A keynote by Guy Kawasaki kicked off the evening by saying that he "loved swag," which inspired me to think about that for the rest of the evening.

Since there was a screen with recent tweets next to the presenter, the crowd was definitely hard to impress.  As a reward for hearing each of these product monkeys out, each blogger gets a filled swag bag with everything that was demonstrated, including the black garlic [it's fermented or something]. There were some flashier items like iPhone covers and How to be the best damn entrepenuer, period type books,  but my favorite thing in the bag was the most unassuming item. It was a small bound book called Laughs 4 Dads: A blog by Mark Hallen.  I am always looking for a good read to spice up my train ride into the city, and I grabbed this as I left my house this morning.  Hallen wrote a book over 20 years ago and recently decided to get back into writing via blogging. I was laughing a good amount of my train ride, appearing to be a crazy person. It was worth it; Hallen's short collection of blog posts conveying the dark (but hillarious) side of parenting were very amusing. I have read a lot of blogs, and this is probably the first parenting blog I can relate to without going through labor pains.

Just as Kawasaki articulated early on, everyone loves free stuff; why not do something different like Hallen? My second favorite item in the bag was a service that turns your kids drawings into pillow-cases. It had such a weird name that I can't quite remember it, but it was very similar to art2believe. Maybe I have been worn down with my dresser filled with XXL swag shirts, but I think that it's worht thinking about what a company should give out to make a lasting impression. While I was at CNET, I collected a plethora of swag, much of which I still have around today. Stickers, pens, lanyards, and shirts have been done to death, should companies just give out garlic instead? Perhaps I have gone soft since I am going to be an aunt for the first time, but I am not sure how many more lanyards a human being can collect. I suggest that companies bring back the need-factor to swag and leave the novelty behind.

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