Brussels + Beer = The Belgian Beer Weekend
Posted: Monday 05 September, 2011
Alex Smith
This weekend I had the pleasure of joining the rest of my family over in Brussels, Belgium. The city hosted its famous beer weekend over the past couple of days, so naturally I felt this was an opportunity too good to pass up.
Lots of fine beers were drank on a scorching day in the Grand Place / Grote Markt (depending on where you're from), and one thing that I noticed across the whole of the event was a lack of social media.
I must note that this had no impact on the event at all, and wasn't to the detriment of the overall experience, in fact you could easily argue that it was better without the input of social networks, given the beautiful surroundings. However, my mind was constantly thinking "what this place needs is more avenues for digital visibility". Perhaps you could win free beer tokens for checking in on Foursquare, or tokens off certain beers for tweeting about it, the possibilities were endless. I think that from a visibility perspective, brands engaging in activities with consumers in real-life will soon find that it's imperative to integrate their digital marketing into such events - the benefit from doing so can be immense.
Either way, this didn't detract from the event, it was a cracking weekend, it just struck me that more could be done, and I'm sure that given the growing importance of integrating real-life experiences with each consumer's digital activity, the organisers will have something up their sleeves next year. I'll be aiming to find out one way or another!
