Windpower 2012 - Atlanta, Georgia

Last week my Marketing Manager and I attended AWEA's 2012 Windpower Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. It's a great show, though unfortunately - this year may have also been one of my last. The education element of the show is slowly but surely pulling away - leaving gigantic booths filled with mostly manufacturers and consultants. Last year it seemed a no brainer to participate in this show once we grew our Renewable Energy line a bit. This year... the idea no longer seemed so logical.

Still, our Tuesday at the show was well spent. Since we didn't have a booth for the show, we put together some guerrilla marketing tactics (coined by someone who saw what we were doing and was impressed). We had shirts made up as well as little social media cards - one of us was in charge of leading people to Twitter, the other Facebook. (BTW - follow or like us if you're the environmentally friendly type.)

               
Cool, right?

We started the day off with the general session. Karl Rove and Robert Gibbs sat down to discuss the bipartisan support of wind energy. That was one of those awesome, once in a lifetime experiences.

Deciding to live tweet that event was really beneficial to us, mainly because others had decided to do it as well. We got the bulk of our followers, RTs and mentions during that hour. Unfortunately, that left us with rather high hopes for the rest of the day, which weren't met once all of that attention started to trail off. 

The cards definitely paid off - our number of followers is still pretty low, considering - but it's more than it had been. And we've attracted just as many followers since the show as when we were there. What we're not sure of is how successful our shirts were. They were meant to get people curious and allow them to scan from a distance without actually needing to talk to us. It may have hooked a few people, but for the most part - it was just really nice that we matched. And we overheard at least one group of people say, "Look at how cute their shirts are!" 

Other than that - the main excitement of the day was Maine Wind Pavilion's public unveiling of our newest textbook, by Northern Maine Community College instructor, Wayne Kilcollins. It drew a lot of guests and they were also able to raffle off a signed copy of the book. 

Wayne seemed excited, proud and honored to be recognized in this way by his state - as were we. He did an amazing job on this book and I can't wait to monitor its performance over the coming years.