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Comment by Mongoose | Hacker News Reader

Whitepages.com always seems to recruit very aggressively at career fairs at my school (U of WA). They'll be at a booth nestled in between Intel and Google pitching their hearts out. Commendable, to say the least.

However, they majorly over-played the "rockstar programmer" meme by handing out branded drumsticks and guitar picks last year. I always laugh upon noticing my pair of Whitepages.com drumsticks when unpacking my snare drum.

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And, yet, you still have the drum sticks...and everyone that happens to think highly of you will let a little of that goodwill rub off on the brand that's on your sticks. That sounds like an excellent marketing expenditure, to me.

The best you can hope for from schwag is that most of what you give away doesn't get thrown away, and actually gets used for a few months, or longer. Sounds like this one worked out well. At conferences, you can always tell what the worst schwag is by looking in the trash cans on the way out of the expo hall. The stuff that gets thrown away immediately is utterly wasted; the stuff that makes it into the suitcase and gets back home with someone is the good stuff.

I'm not arguing against the efficacy of the drumsticks. They're vastly more unique and useful than the heap of lanyards, mints, and stickers that accumulate after conferences or career fairs. They're one of the few pieces of schwag that I'll probably have with me 6 months from now. So, in terms of their goal as marketing tools, they're perfect. My only issue was with the overuse of the "rockstar" title being applied to developers.

Agreed on the rockstar thing. I started to see a lot of people complain about this, so I wrote about it here: http://thesethings.posterous.com/rapping-grandmas-and-ninja-...

You're exactly right with the overuse. It didn't have to be innately bad to say "rockstar," just a couple of things have conspired to make it so...

Drumsticks is a way forward from the usual stuff like mugs, t-shirts and so on.

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