If you’re an event planner who regularly schedules and sets up seminars, workshops and conferences, then you know the nightmare of ensuring that all the meeting materials end up in the hands of attendees.
In the past, this meant shipping hundreds of pounds of printed materials to the conference site, finding table space to lay it all out and having enough staff on hand to ensure that each attendee got all the materials.

More often than not, it was a sea of printed matter, along with CDs, DVDs and other takeaways that were expensive to produce, expensive to ship to the conference and expensive for attendees to take with them.
Flash drives are a delightful alternative, saving you time, money and space. It also saves your attendees money on the flight home, since they don’t have to pay often outrageous additional bag fees with airlines to lug all the materials home. They can even carry your flash drive on the plane with them and spend the trip home reviewing everything they learned.

Since the material can be created so that it is searchable, flash drives also offer the recipient the chance to review materials as they wish, rather than having to thumb through linear pieces of printed matter to locate the one thing they really wanted to know.

Best of all, everything can be stored in one portable medium, from the meeting notes and speaker presentations to video demos, Q&As and more. And if your attendees are willing to wait for their drive, you can even pre-load videos of the each presentation onto the drive along with candid photos of receptions and conference events.
Additional items can include:

- Presenter biographies
- Technical papers and white papers
- Links to post conference content on the web
- A directory of all attendees and presenters
- Sponsor links and marketing materials
- Information on other upcoming conferences, seminars and workshops

Feedback forms
This is really just the tip of the iceberg and the actual materials included on the USB stick can really be anything imaginable.

You could even send the USB flash drive to the attendee along with their registration confirmation ahead of time and include all the pre-meeting information they need, the schedule of events, speaker bios, a map of the meeting facility, suggestions about what to bring, etc.

Once attendees arrive, they can return the USB flash drives to you on the first day, giving you time to reload new information onto them that is specific to the meeting. Or you can send them after the event with all the keynote videos and photo memories.

This has the added benefit of allowing you to double the branding potential of the USB flash drive, sending the drive to the attendee, letting them use it until the meeting for their planning purposes and then returning it to them at the end with new information on it.
If you do use the before-after approach with USB flash drive information, be sure to let your attendees know ahead of time so they don’t load additional information onto the drive they are bringing to the meeting. This also has the added benefit of not having to reunite USB flash drives with specific attendees, saving you invaluable time and money.

Just be sure to bring additional USB flash drives with you. There’s always those in attendance who forget to bring theirs with them and you don’t want to be caught short. Usually, having a 10% overage is sufficient to cover the forgetful ones.

It is a lesson learned for all companies that give out USB drives with preloaded content – check your drives on your own systems first before handing them out. You want to make sure they are malware free while also making sure that the preloaded content is yours and not someone else’s.

Of course, choosing a reputable promotional company is the smartest way to prevent such a PR nightmare. IBM had to apologize in a letter sent to delegates, along with instructions for removing the malware, which was set up to run using setup.exe and autorun.ini files. Once the drive was inserted, the malware was automatically loaded onto the unsuspecting delegate’s computer. Unfortunately, the final instruction in the letter recommended reloading all the core operating system software, which, as everyone knows, is a nightmare.

If you’re contemplating the use of preloaded content on your USB flash drives, there’s no need to shy away from your plan. This is a great way to share sales materials, brochures, video demos, PowerPoints and other information with your prospects and clients.
With just a few precautions, you can confidently go with your original plan and preload content with confidence and success.

Double Check Your Source Files
As you prepare your marketing materials, make sure the computer you’re using isn’t already infected. Even if the factory checks the drives, you can accidentally transfer a virus through your own files. So double check them before sending them to the promotional company for integration and production into hundreds or thousands of USB flash drives.

Reconsider AutoRun
A file that automatically loads and runs may sound like a great idea from a marketing standpoint. The prospect or client automatically sees your marketing messages – very cool! But, there is a small risk that you can introduce malware. No matter how unlikely, you don’t want to have an IBM on your hands, sending out letters of apology for giving your contacts malware.

Choose a Reliable Supplier
The best way to prevent a problem is to hire a reputable supplier for your USB flash drives. They will be able to ensure that your disks aren’t infected at the manufacturer level so that you’re not stuck with a couple hundred or thousand branded USB flash drives that are infected and virtually useless.

Do Some Spot Checks
Once you receive your shipment of promotional USB flash drives, pick a couple out at random and run them on your own computer. Of course, you want to make sure you have the most up-to-date virus checker installed on your computer so that any of the latest incarnations of malware out there can’t slip through. You also want to make sure that the content that’s preloaded is yours and there wasn’t a mix up with another order.

With these simple precautions you should be able to continue to enjoy the power of preloaded content without the slightest fear of it backfiring on you. The real secret, of course, is to partner with a vendor who also has your best interests at heart. They may not be the lowest cost provider, but at least the low cost doesn’t include the cost of infecting your prospects and customers with malware.

If you’re an event organiser, chances are good that your hard work has paid off with a seminar, meeting, reunion, wedding or trade show that attendees will remember for a long time.
As you know these events offer everyone a great time to connect or reconnect, make new friends, find new customers, network and cement relationships that may last years, if not a lifetime.

To make these memories last, think about using USB flash drives, not only as a type of digital scrapbook, but as a chance to further your branding as an event organiser or sponsor.
Here’s how to do it. As the event unfolds, capture all the key moments digitally. This can include photos, video, music, keynote presentations or even digital versions of printed materials, such as menus, invitations, speeches or workbooks.

Once the event is finished, combine all these materials into an edited form of the event. You can create slideshows, music videos, create links to websites for additional resources or allow recipients to print out documents or photos.
When it’s completed, have the files preloaded onto a promotional USB flash drive. If you don’t know how to do this, ask the company handling your flash drive order. They will help you put your brand to work for you, not only by adding your logo to the outside of the drive case, but pre loading the files onto each drive.

Now you have something that you can either give away or sell to recipients. The latter is a smart idea, since you cover the cost of the drive plus a mark-up that will help you generate additional revenue. It is a great value-added souvenir that not only lets the recipient re-experience the event itself, but also can be used over and over again to backup or store digital files at work or home.

This keeps your brand front and centre as the USB flash drive owner uses your keepsake in their everyday life. And, it’s not only a lasting reminder of the event, but of your organisation.

Preloading marketing messages onto a USB flash drive that’s being given away as a promotional gift has been standard practice for many years. Unfortunately, the AutoRun feature found in Windows causes the message to load and run every time the drive is inserted.

That’s pretty annoying and has caused marketers to second guess their desire to add promotional messaging to their promo drives.

Thankfully, Microsoft is about to sound the death knell of the AutoRun feature, primarily because malicious programmers have been using it to spread malware and viruses. To stop this practice, Window 7 will stop any AutoRun tasks, so users won’t be tricked into launching apps that could have infectious code.

That means that your USB flash drive recipients won’t have your message load every time they insert the USB drive into their computers and flash drives will be less of a threat for system administrators. Instead, the drive will simply show up as removable drive, without running first.

This is great news for everyone involved. First, recipients will be more likely to use promotional USB flash drives since they don’t have to worry about their computers being tricked into uploading malicious code automatically. Second, your drive will become an invaluable part of the recipient’s daily computer use, since it is such a convenient way to store and share files. Of course we can still pre load your marketing message which can be opened by the receiver as normal, this data can either be erasable or locked.

For those early adopters, the new feature is already available in the RC build of Windows 7. Microsoft is planning to make the chance available on Windows Vista and Windows XP as well, so all of their customers can benefit from the new capabilities that make USB flash drives more useful than ever.