Taupaki

So I’ve been doing a bit of work lately with a guy called Adam Richards.  If you are a New Zealand reader you’ll know Adam as the 2005 D1NZ Champion and driver of that crazy camo RB26 cefiro.  For everyone else, Adam’s been in the game for a long time.  He was one of the first people in New Zealand to start drifting (circa 2001) and has represented New Zealand twice at the World All Stars Event held in the US after qualifying first at the D1GP drivers search at Pukekohe.  He’s also competed in the EDC throughout Europe and built the Dodsons HKS replica S15.

Adam came to me a month or so back and asked if I could put together a video he could use to attract potential sponsors.  I said it shouldn’t be a problem and had a look through a couple of hard drives only to find 3 clips of the cefiro drifting at Hampton Downs.  I then had a look through Youtube, Vimeo, emailed a few people from the UK and got nowhere fast.  So there was my first problem, no footage.  I asked Adam to hunt around for any footage he had and to send it up.  I would have preferred to shoot my own stuff but you work with what you have and with the cefiro in pieces getting ready for the 2010/2011 season it wasn’t going to be possible.  Anyway a couple of weeks later we came up with this:

It’s 99% complete, a couple of loose ends to tidy up then it’s done.

Now I don’t know why, but only a couple of NZ drivers seem to have websites and I asked Adam if he had anything in the pipeline.  He said he had looked into it a year or two ago but was put off by the price.  I was interested to find out just how much these guys are spending on getting themselves online.  I was pretty shocked.  Another thing I quickly found out about Adam was that he had virtually no profile online.  I googled his name and it brought up 3 reference, 2 to a D1NZ Wikipedia entry and 1 to a 4 year old magazine feature of the cefiro.  The concerning thing is Adam’s been drifting professionally for nearly 10 years and there was no way for any potential sponsors to contact him.

So I had an idea.  I’ve been blogging for around 2 years now and have found wordpress to be pretty versatile.  It’s easy to use and has a great statistical program built in to track where your hits are coming from and upgrading certain features is a breeze.  So before I knew it we’d purchased adamrichardsdrift.com and had started to piece together the associated pages w/ information from Adams old proposal and directly with Adam himself.

I wanted to attract as much traffic as possible to Adams site.  To do so there was another step that I couldn’t ignore.  I’m not a huge fan of Facebook but you can’t deny it’s ability to create traffic and most professional athletes have a fan page.  So we chucked a few photos up there and then I went in search of a Facebook plugin for WordPress.  This allows any posts that Adams makes on his blog to post directly to his fan page Wall. It cuts down the amount of time you have to spend keeping everyone up to date.

So a one off video request quickly turned into a Social Media package.  I’m pretty happy with the way everything has turned out and we’re planning on going live on Wednesday w/ a bit of a viral facebook campaign haha.  Adam actually ended up sending my MS Paint logo to his sign writers so look out for some new stickers on the cefiro soon!

Check out the Rood Mobile camera car.