Regent Street Online Girl Geek Event

I have to admit that the word geek is not a term that I’d ever consider using to describe myself. I’d probably much rather poke pins in my nails than sit through a Star Wars Movie. I can’t speak Klingon, and never intend to learn, and I’m afraid that you’d #SEMStump me if you asked me to tell you what HTML stands for.

Social Media, however, is something that I do know about, and so I was keen to attend Saturday’s Girl Geek Event which was focused on Social Media and how companies are using the internet to interact with their customers.

How Nike Have Social Media Sorted

Nike is an example of a business that seems to be adept at the whole Social Media thing, or so Jess Greenwood explained at our 11am lecture. Nike’s latest event in association with Lance Armstrong’s charity – Livestrong, was focused around the Tour De France. To motivate the cyclists, fans often chalk messages of support along the roads. Nike thought that it would be fantastic if supporters that couldn’t get to France had the chance to do this and so set up a Facebook page, which they linked to a specially adapted machine.  This machine automatically took messages straight from Facebook and painted them on a road somewhere in France, before sending it back to the supporter.  The machine even had an inbuilt filter that automatically took out swear-words and messages of abuse!

Nike is regularly cited as a company that is at the forefront of Social Media, but it has to be said that Regent Street Online, who were running today’s event in conjunction with Girl Geek Dinners, certainly knew what they were doing. Inviting close to 60 girls all with active blogs and Twitter accounts, not to mention a horde of readers and followers between them, was a great idea on their part and during the day a lot of fun was to be had by all involved.

The Treasure Hunt Begins

Our adventure began at the glamorous Swarovski store, which today doubled up as the Girl Geek headquarters. We were based on the top floor, which contained a crystal encrusted bar and several Macs which the geeks could use throughout the day to update their blogs and vlogs. As we stood in the queue waiting to claim our goodies some of the girls had already got their video cameras out and were asking others the views on the earlier presentation.  We were then handed a deck of 15 pink and silver cards, each containing a QR code on the back and details of what we could from each shop or restaurant on the front. All of the cards, bar one stated that the free gifts, would be given to the first 50 girls entering the establishment – therefore after receiving the first gift of a Swarovski encrusted USB pen from the Swarovski store – we decided that we needed to come up with a route strategy and where better to plan this strategy than in the roof bar of the Courthouse Hotel while claiming our free cocktails.

Okay so it had only just turned 12pm, which probably explained why none of the other geeks followed us to the bar, but at least we were coming up with a strategy! The barman was delighted that we were his first customers and poured us two extremely strong cocktails, which we sipped as we used Google Maps to plan our route. We also needed to download a new QR reader, one of the other things going on today was a QR treasure hunt around Regent Street and without a working QR reader we wouldn’t be able to take part in this half of the event.

We Use Our Logic…

Stumbling out of the Courthouse, we went to Liberty’s where we collected a gorgeous velvet bag of skincare products from the desk of REN Skincare. We then walked down to the BOSE store where, after watching a cinematic presentation on the new Bose speaker system, we were awarded with goody bags. Mine contained a wireless mouse, T-shirt and mug, while my guy geek, Nathan, had got a rather swish looking laptop case. My favourite freebie of the day was a monogrammed tea-cup, which I choose at the Anthropologie Store. However, getting a two-course dinner and drinks for free at Tibits, a vegetarian restaurant with the nicest cheese quiche I’d ever tasted, certainly wasn’t bad either. We may have complained about being full, but we still had plenty of room for our free Freggo passion-fruit ice-cream and Godiva chocolates, which we washed down with Mojitos from the National Geographic Store.

The other part of our tour had led us to believe that the QR code that we were seeking was somewhere in this store, and we located it downstairs next to the freezing chambers. After each scanning the code, our iPhones took us to a page informing us that we had won the bonus prize and could collect our reward from the Base Camp. We were almost done, so after the pressing issue of claiming our free glass of champagne at Hawes and Curtis, we made our way back to Base Camp thoroughly exhausted.

The day had been a huge success – not just in terms of the loot that we both managed to secure, but also for all the businesses involved. After a day tweeting, on my personal account, I received a message from a business that wanted to know when the next Girl Geeks event was occurring, as they were keen to supply freebies for it – another business picking up on how Social Media could be of benefit them.