And The SMX West 2008 Schwag Awards Go To…

As many of you exhibitors knew, Danny Sullivan sent me on a mission to find the best schwag ever at SMX West because I am a schwag addict. In the end, you all had a lot of great schwag, and it’s super hard to choose the “best” piece. Therefore, I’m going to categorize my favorites.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll feature all this schwag on my Schwag Addict site. Until then, here are the contenders for best schwag of SMX West 2008. By the way, only exhibitors with schwag available to all conference-goers were considered for these awards (unfortunately, that means that the eVisibility shirts, which totally rocked, were not valid for entry).

Without further ado, here are the best shirts of SMX West ’08:

The SureHits shirt is stylish and cool. I saw one person wear it at the airport, and my husband wore it out to lunch yesterday. In other words, people aren’t embarrassed to take it with them, and you can’t blame them. This shirt is hot.

SEOmoz has shirts! And I saw another guy at the airport wearing one!

The RankSense shirts were clever.

While I think supplies were limited, MatchCraft had an awesome colored shirt.

You can never have too many pens. However, one pen stood out in creativity above the rest:

At first glance, the WideMile pen looks like nothing but a pen with a lot of plastic. But in the dark, it becomes a pen that lights up blue!

And other winners of obvious prizes include:

SmartSearch Marketing wins the award for “Most Edible” Schwag with the M&Ms inside this little case. DoubleClick comes in a close 2nd with their mints.

Idearc ties for the “most useful” schwag award with this cool LED keychain.

Tied for “most useful” is the WebTrends MarketingLab magnets, which are extremely powerful fridge magnets. I like.

LookSmart wins the “most colorful” award with this sweet set of highlighters.

ABCSearch wins the “most fun” (or “most annoying,” however way you look at it) award for the coolest magnets that you can play with. These things click and make a ton of noise, but they’re super addictive.

Another “most fun” award goes to Bruce Clay for the colorful tanglers. You can’t go wrong with these toys.

Finally, in honor of my friend Curtis at Superb Hosting, this is his choice of “most fun” schwag (and I’d be inclined to agree if I didn’t actually spend 10 minutes with those little darts on my fingers. Beware; they actually do stop circulation!).

Last but not least, the Sphinn and Search Engine Land stickers rocked. That’s my laptop you’re looking at, and there’s room for other stickers. (I like stickers.)

Thanks for playing and hope to see you at SMX Advanced in Seattle this coming June!

Tamar Weinberg is a social media enthusiast who blogs about Digg and other social news sites and services on Techipedia. She is also a huge schwag addict.