Geocaching to attract customers

[Toblerone]

This is slightly off-topic, but have you heard of geocaching? It's a high-tech hide-and-seek game where you use your GPS to find a treasure box or "cache", then claim the "find" and exchange trinkets? It might be a fun use for that fancy hand-held GPS unit you just bought. And you could also hide a "geocache" treasure on or near your maple operation to lure potential customers. While they are not allowed to be explicitly commercial they can let people know about your retail location (if you have one). Our family has been doing it for a year now and we love it. It brings us to cool interesting sites that we would have never have gone to otherwise. The website where you can look up geocaches near you is http://www.geocaching.com (I'm MapleDave on there).

[Bucket Head]

A buddy of mine and his wife did this sort of thing, but not with maple. They do honey so they would leave these little honey bee ornaments/decorations at the cache sites.

Anything is worth a try, right?

Steve

[Mackdaddy]

Tobelrone,

You should be in Marketing!! Pretty cool idea!

[Toblerone]

Thanks Mackdaddy. They also have these cool things called "travel bugs" that fellow geocachers move from cache to cache.. all of which gets logged and tracked on the geocaching website. I have one of those blue plastic taps as a travel bug. You can see the log for it here (http://www.geocaching.com/track/details.aspx?id=1999732). It's gone from Ohio to Florida to Wisconsin to Tennessee and finally up around Seattle.

Geocachers, though, get a little put off by things that are overtly commercial. They don't like business cards being dropped into caches for instance. But there are geocoins (http://www.geocaching.com/track/geocoinfaq.aspx) which are similar to "travel bugs," in that they get passed from cache to cache. They are actual coins that you can have minted with your name and whatever imagery you like. You could probably put your sugar house graphics and logos on that and it probably wouldn't be considered overtly commercial.

Probably the best thing to do would be to hide your own geocache on or near your property and to have special geocoins minted and available for trade in your geocache (just a few at a time, I wouldn't put a pile of them in there). Fellow geocachers could see your operation and move the geocoins (and your good name) out to other caches.

Just some ideas.

[mapleman3]

I have done Geocaching, it's fun. gets you out to places you never would have hiked or went to... great for the whole family and you can do it year round... well not in feb march, thats SUGARING TIME

our caching name is... of course.... " The Maple Gang " we have about 123 finds and around 7 hides

[Sue @ Battel's Sugar Bush]

We're geocachers (Team Peppercorn on geocaching.com) and we had a cache in our maple woods for a couple years. We also didn't want to be overly commercial because we placed the cache for fun and not to sell syrup, but maybe some buyers did stop by because of it.

The sugar bush is such a fun place for people to be — especially those who like the outdoors like geocachers — so maybe we should plan a geocaching event in our woods! Any ideas?