So what do we do now? …Road Trip!

The gang over at Plaid are at it again; it’s time for the Plaid Nation Tour 2008!

This time, focusing on the West Coast, the Plaid crew will be visiting Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, Redding, San Fransisco, San Luis Obispo, San Diego and Vegas, (and if they’re lucky, a few In-N-Out Burgers). *If there are any East-Coasters headed out West any time in the near future, do yourself a favor and head on out to The Dude’s favorite burger joint while you’re out there. (Then try to leave without ordering a burger for the road… I dare you.)

Back to the tour… Plaid, while tooling around in a camera, twitter (@plaid), blog, and IM-equipped van, is on this mission to share the knowledge of how different social media tools can work for a brand. They’re kind of like social media missionaries, spreading the good word of the interwebs.

Believe me, I’ll be glued to my computer following Darryl and the gang through their trip. I wasn’t a twitter-addict when they did their East coast tour last year, so I’m really looking forward to watching them make their way around, and I’m even more looking forward to learning how social media works for other companies out there.

Over at SheltAir, we did our 11-city road trip back in April; did a lap around FL, then up to NY and back in my boss’ 38′ RV (4,641 miles of awesome). Though our trip’s focus was mainly on employee safety (bad things can happen to someone when they’re working around aircraft engines and not paying attention), we also got a chance to meet a lot of our customers and spend some much-needed time getting to know our coworkers in our other cities.

We tried the live web-cam from the road thing as well, but it wasn’t nearly as slick as what the Plaid guys have hooked up. We got pretty decent viewership on it, and we’d get calls from our friends and coworkers as we cracked a few adult beverages asking us, “Wasn’t this was supposed to be a business trip?” On a bright note, the Safety Tour ended up being a great excuse for me to start a company blog, and the boss loved it. By the end of our trip, though, I was ready to sleep for a week, so to the Plaid gang, I know your struggle (though our van was a little bit bigger than yours).

So, good luck on your trip, Plaid-folks! Watch out for smokey, make sure you get your daily intake of adult beverages, and mooning people from a moving vehicle is still funny… even if you’re an adult.