Loading Files Onto USB Memory Sticks Is Tedious But Essential
If you’re looking to buy USB memory sticks printed with your company name on and you plan to give them out to customers at a show, event or conference then you’d be crazy to give them away without taking advantage of the storage capacity on them.
USB memory sticks are very popular giveaways at the moment because they’re not that expensive (albeit they have a high perceived value), they’re small and easy to carry and they come in a wide range of styles and colours which makes them ideal for branding up with a logo.
Most USB sticks that are given away will have a storage (memory) capacity of around 1Gb to 4GB, which is huge and will support thousands of documents and hundreds of media files. It was only a few years ago that PC’s were shipping with this sort of Hard Disk Drive capacity and now we take it for granted on a humble little USB memory stick!
So, if you’re going to give away a product that’s primary use is to store and transport data on it makes sense to put your own files onto the USB drive before you hand them out. After all, if the objective of giving them away is to build awareness about your company, your products and what you do doesn’t it make sense to load onto the drive, documents, PDF’s, media files (move clips, adverts, etc.) that really show off what you’re about and how the recipient of the drive can get in touch with you.
The only downside to pre-loading your USB memory sticks with data is actually doing it! If you have to manually load each and every stick yourself one at a time on your PC or Mac then not only can it take hours but you’ll soon find its one of the most boring and tedious activities known to man! If you’ve got lots of data to load each stick can take 5-10 minutes at a time so if you’ve got hundreds to do you can end up writing off an evening or two and sometimes a whole week-end!
Far better to simply hand over the data files to your USB memory stick supplier and give them the problem. It’ll mean you’ll have to be super organised and get your data ready early but if you can do this it’ll be well worth it.
Most USB memory suppliers (well those worth dealing with) will have their own in-house data loading machines that will not only load the data automatically but they’ll also run checks on the data as it’s loaded to make sure its OK and they’ll also make sure the data is virus free! You don’t want to go handing out flash drives that end up infecting the PC’s of all your customers!
So the advice is always data-load but always get someone else to do it for you (where at all possible).