Eric Sink – Evil Mastermind of Marketing

Erik Sink was running a promotion where he’d send you a T-Shirt and then in turn you’d agree to blog about it, for several reasons (listed below) the above screenshot is probably a better payback.

To promote Fabjectory, we recently attended the Second Life Community Convention and put some of Eric’s advice about tradeshows into practice. If you missed it in some of the previous posts, Fabjectory is a service that takes people’s avatars and virtual 3d objects and with the help of some rapid prototyping machines makes real life, digitally colored statuettes about them.

To promote SourceGear (Eric’s company), at a tradeshow he had a prize that you were only eligible for if you were wearing one of the t-shirts that they’d given away the previous day.

As providing people with free t-shirts was outside the budget we had setup, we decided instead to giveaway stickers. Besides being about 100th the cost of a t-shirt, it’s a lot easier to get someone to put a sticker on their shirt right now than to wear a t-shirt.

As people came up to the booth, we told them that we were doing a drawing for a figure ($150 – $200 value), if they wanted to enter they wrote their name on the back of a sticker with a fine point Sharpie marker. We then gave them back the sticker (now missing it’s backing) and most people put it on their shirt, hat or back of their badge. If anyone looked uncomfortable or like we were forcing them to take a sticker we just took it back and pitched it. At the 800 person conference we gave out nearly 400 stickers and took back maybe 10 from people that didn’t want them. The staff running the contest were even cool enough to announce the drawing at the opening ceremony and let us do the drawing at the closing.

We had pretty steady traffic at the booth from the stickers as people saw them and talked about the figures, etc.

People really liked the figures and the one thing we heard over and over was “they look so much better in person than the pictures on your website”, so we’re going to be upgrading the current poster board, clip lights and bookshelf photography area to a more professional light tent setup in the hopes of improving our product shots.

SLCC was a great experience and it was a blast meeting people from all over the world who I had only known online previously.