Who can you trust with your brand?

If you’re following us on Twitter, you’ll know all about The HWY Apprentice Sponsored by Glam Adelaide, it’s #TweachMe hash tag and the 4 apprentice teams batting it out for $5000 & a trip for 2 to LA.

The idea was born late 2009 in the HWY office over a pot of green tea and soy latte.  Aiming to give up-and-coming Adelaide event organisers and promoters a foot in the door to an otherwise difficult industry to get into, we began planning our main event for 2010.

One by one the apprentice teams began promoting their events.  It was around this time we realised we had, in effect, left our brand & our sponsor’s brands, in the hands of four relatively inexperienced amateur event organisers.

‘HWY’ is a brand we have worked tirelessly to promote and make sure it is seen in a positive light which is associated with a fresh, healthy and female friendly environment.  We’re aware of spamming our followers, fans and database members, we don’t ‘shout’ our message to our guests and we maintain a quirky, left field outlook without taking ourselves too seriously.  Suddenly, this can all go horribly wrong in one of the biggest events we have staged.

Admittedly, we were aware of this before we began the journey.  We engaged the services of four industry leaders in Adelaide to hold 4 workshops in PR, event management, brand management and social media to teach the basics of promoting events.

We came out the other end of the subsequent 4 weeks relatively unscathed.  There were a few spammy tweets and Facebook tags/posts and some artwork we were nervous about having our logo attached to.  On the plus side, we received some unexpected media exposure across print & radio.  The result was a successful promotion with some staggering statistics attached to it.

We gained over 2000 Facebook ‘likes’
400 Twitter users followed us
@HWYhotel was seen trending in Adelaide on more than one occasion

All the additional exposure was reflected in our bottom line making the event an all round success.  Especially for Team Chiggy & their My Voice Rocks event who walked away with the grand prize of a trip for 2 to LA, $5000 and a 12 month contract with The Highway to stage a further 4 events.

We’d love to hear your feedback from the event.  How did it unfold from an outsiders point of view?  Was there too much exposure to handle?  Not enough?  Let us know your comments so we can improve our own event planning skills for next year’s HWY Apprentice event.