Search Schwag

GoDaddy is famous for their cute-girls-in-tight-shirts campaign. When still a relatively small and unheard of company, they took a simple t-shirt with their logo printed on it and created the type of buzz usually reserved for celebrities and established corporations. Who knew a promotional shirt could do so much! Now they sell the popular shirts for $15.00 a piece on their site, www.godaddy.com. Every t-shirt sold or given away is another advertisement for them- genius.

Check out some other unique apparel promotions like Google’s dress giveaway to Pam Anderson.

I found this awesome post at promotional-t-shirts.com with a great Twitter idea. This girl printed twitter shirts with her twitter name on them encouraging people to follow her. Apparently it has earned her over 10,000 followers so far.

I’ve actually heard of people doing this for trade shows too. They print up a bunch of shirts with their social networking sites on them so they essentially become their own living business cards. It’s a much better idea than becoming a walking advertisement for Abercrombie or Hollister. At least this way your chest is displaying something useful for the world to read!

For YouTube fans–especially those who like puns — the Google store now offers “tube” socks emblazoned with the popular website’s logo. The simple red-on-white design goes with anything, while the modestly-sized logo print proudly proclaims the wearer’s love for user-generated video content.

The YouTube logo looks great on other types of apparel besides socks, too — t shirts, sweatshirts, hats … would you wear YouTube boxers, or a YouTube bathrobe?

Blogger Social is an event held by the online marketing community for bloggers to gather in one place and socialize, network, and learn from some of the best and most interesting bloggers in the world. The event always consists of a three-day weekend filled with fun outings and dinners that take advantage of some of the best hot-spots in the U.S. Last year’s Blogger Social was held in New York City, and attendees received these custom caps as part of participating in the occasion. This year’s Blogger Social was supposed to take place in Boston, but was put off until next year. Hopefully Blogger Social 2010 comes out with some new and exciting merchandise to promote the event!

blog.skiheavenly.com

Even though it’s summer, I had to mention this MySpace Schwag Bag Giveaway which takes place every year in February. I have not come across any social media site or search engine that has ever given such an enormous schwag package as this one. Winners receive a custom backpack with Heavenly (ski resort) schwag, Solstice gear, Bern hat, Freeskier beanie, Flatline beanie, Skullcandy headphones, Rome shades and EESA promotional socks. To enter the February MySpace Swag Bag Giveaway add Heavenly as a friend on MySpace and send your best photos of Heavenly resort to its website in early February. Winners are announced in mid-February.

Southwest recently gave Twitter users a chance at winning this promotional gift package by following the company’s profile within a time-range of several hours. The winner received a full set of Southwest schwag, including a custom t-shirt, imprinted book sleeves, and a promotional koozie. Southwest was able to reach its goal of attaining more than 20,000 followers within a few hours. Seems like Twitter has been doing a great job in helping businesses with their promotions ever since it started running live, so props to Twitter!

Google employs some of the most intelligent, laborious workers on the planet, but who said it can’t be fun to work there? After all, the company’s employees are supplied with thousands of custom toys to fuddle around with while brainstorming and doing other work. In fact, Google’s engineers are given one day a week dedicated to brainstorming, where they have access to Google’s promotional merchandise, toys, and gadgets if they are having trouble coming up with new ideas and ways to improve the company’s software and web applications. Workers have access to Google’s special imprinted puzzles, building blocks, exercise balls, swimming pools, volley ball courts, scooters, lava lamps, pool tables; the list goes on and on. Googlers are even allowed to bring their own dogs to work (no cats for some reason)! Yes, life in the GooglePlex can be challenging, but a workplace that makes you feel like a kid again is far from ubiquitous in the U.S., so I think we can all appreciate Google’s take on corporate culture and motivation.

Having trouble finding a job? Try using these Facebook custom business cards to send to some companies that rely on social networking as a major marketing tactic. Maybe your resume isn’t that great, but you may be able to impress a few employers by giving them a Facebook business card to help them remember you while making them laugh a little as well. The Facebook Business cards were made by French designer Jean-Baptiste Gouraud.

We all know about the Microsoft-Yahoo deal which was confirmed recently. Yahoo gave up it’s effort to oust Google in the search field by agreeing to use Microsoft’s Bing search engine. Microsoft will allow Yahoo’s sales reps to sell search ads on Bing and Yahoo sites and Microsoft agreed to let Yahoo keep 88% of the revenue on ads that appear on Yahoo sites. With the two also relying on Microsoft’s AdCenter, it seems as though Yahoo is the lesser of the two in the deal. Yet, if you look at Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer signing the contract with a huge micro-hoo promotional pen, he clearly wants the two corporate giants on equal footing!

via: Promo Know-How Zone

I’ve seen almost all types of apparel from search engines, but I have yet to see custom shoes. Yahoo, with its new purple imprinted shoes, has outdone Google and MSN for the time being. These shoes are made out of durable vulcanized rubber outsole, whatever that means. I just think it’s cool that the Yahoo logo is imprinted on the front of the tongue of each shoe. If you really want to be noticed on the streets, Yahoo has purple promotional t-shirts to match the shoes for a vibrant color coordination.