50 uses for QR codes

Ok! You’ve generated your neat little square thing, now where should it link to?

Whether your goals are advertising, informing, galvanizing advocates or garnering Facebook ‘likes’, the QR code is ready to link up your audience to convenient, tailored, local, on-demand info, interactivity, and reasons to think you rule!

Artists

The crafty artist might link:

• from your band’s gig poster to an mp3 of your best track, or a secret remix/accoustic jam
• from your opening’s flyer to your portfolio
• from your art’s title card to your online store
• from your ad to your represenation
• to tickets for your showto a behind-the-scenes video of your process or installation (visual artists), live show (bands), movie shoot (filmmakers)
• to a trailer for your next film
• to a map of your street art installations
• from your poster to your eBay auction
• from band t-shirts to your music on iTunes
• from your band’s gig poster to your online t-shirt store, with 15% discount
• from street art to your manifesto
• from stickers to social critique
• from show flyers to your work on Flickr
• from posters to your Facebook fan page

Self-promotion/branding

The schmoozy future star might link:

• from your business card to your Facebook profile
• from your business card to your Twitter stream
• from your business card to your Linkdin account
• from your business card to your blog
• to a video interview with you (talent show!)
• from your avatar to your blog
• from your power point to your preferred social profile
• from your t-shirt to your blog’s RSS feed

Business advertising

The savvy business might link:

• to a coupon for %10 off the first visit
• to a contest
• to a useful branded app
• to your in-store card to allow payment at checkout
• from a sign in your window to reviews of your establishment
• to a video testimonial from a happy customer
• from an ad to your 1-800 order hotline
• to a Google map to your nearby locations

Products

The intriguing product might link:

• to a coupon for a freebie/sample
• to a video product demonstration
• from product to a fabulous recipe, cooking demo, or glam serving photos
• from ads to mobile shopping
• to clues for a treasure hunt
• to comparison shopping among major retailers
• to a gallery of stars (or the not-so-famous) caught using your product in public
• from your product to your customer service line
• from properties/items ‘for sale’ sign to a sales agent
• from product packaging to a mobile registration site
• to read/write a review
• to a mail-in rebate
• to nutritional info, drug interactions, or material safety data sheet
• to order refills online
• link to a video of your product being destroyed in a hilarious manner
• to a survey about your product (with a reward, natch)
• to your inventory, so you, your staff or your customers knows what’s in stock
• to a customer service or fan forum

Non-profits

The community-connected non-profit might link:

• to a donation page
• to an interactive map of your org’s work throughout your city
• to an augmented reality view of your city’s issues
• to sponsorship opportunities
• to a video of a successful user of your org’s services saying thanks
• from notable landmarks to informative videos of your city’s history
• to mobile updates on disaster situations
• to requests for supplies and volunteers
• to a petition
• to contact your government about an advocacy issue
• to a hotline providing hope

A social media crisis of faith

Facebook. I used to love you, but I had to kill you.

Whether there’s a Facebook exodus come May 31 or not, I have really sobered up to the whole MySpace/Friendster/’it was the style at the time’ social network fad issue. I didn’t believe in it until now. I mean, I knew intellectually that once upon a time MySpace got cool and then uncool, but was sure that could never happen to Facebook. They have half a billion users, for pity’s sake. Like 1/16th of the earth. What could happen to bugger that up?

Facebook’s recent PR shitstorm has largely played out among the digerati, and my sense is that the Average User will continue tending their Farmville real estate come the end of May, oblivious to arcane issues of private data and opt-outs and personalization. That may come to pass, but my faith has been badly shaken.

Like a spooked investor, I see the danger of putting all your eggs in one basket. Building a large Facebook following—instead of a more robust social strategy—could be an unfortunate resource sinkhole, should the bubble burst and the massive social network hustle itself right out of business.

Let’s be proactive and pretend, for a minute, that Facebook is on its last legs as a home for brands.

What’s a marketer to do? Here are some ideas for staying afloat in an uncertain social future.

Diversify your assets

If your core contribution is viral content, spread it out. Use Facebook to point fans to content and foster discussion there, but use YouTube and your own blog/site to host the original stuff. If you’ve just been riding the wave so far and not really developing your own content to share, get busy.

Make real friends & find out where else they hang out

You should already be doing this, but be sure to engage your active Facebook commenters to the point where you feel you really know each other. Google ‘em and follow them on Twitter or on their own blogs. Make the relationship bigger than Facebook, which will help make it deeper anyway. Should a new network arise to take FB’s place, these will be the people you’ll refriend.

Host an IRL event pronto

Get your social scene out and mingling for real as soon as possible. If you’re a non-profit, stage a volunteer event. If you’re a small business, invite people over for a (insert product here) tasting or a workshop. Move the virtual to real life now. This capitalizes on the work you’ve done so far. The point of meeting these people online was to take them to the next level of interaction with your business anyway.

Insource the connections you’ve made

Got an email newsletter, a mailing list, an inhouse CRM strategy? Migrate your new bffs to your own platform. Bring them into the fold. Throw them a discount if you can, and try to attach them to your brand’s inner circle. If you’ve got your own communication strategy running parallel, now would be a good time to solidify subscribers drawn from your FB fans. Invite them personally.

The Glam Girl’s SXSWi Survival Guide

Lucky you! You’re off to SXSW in sunny Austin in a few weeks, to meet other geeks, ogle the internet-famous, and generally get whipped into an interactive froth. Here’s your top 10 tips from a seasoned South By’er to make your webby whirlwind a little more user friendly.

1. Pack your Havaianas

Austin is in Texas. Texas is sweat-inducing even in March. You might still sport jeans and an evening cardi, but you’ll appreciate the built-in air conditioning that accompanies a bare foot. And get a pedi. You’re going to be walking a lot, so decallus and beautify in advance.

2. Pre-pimp your iPhone

Thanks to ubiquitous wifi, in ’08 I got away with carrying only my iPod Touch for internet access! You gotta have:

• SXSW iPhone app
  • View/build your schedule
  • Map conference and festival events each hour
  • Exchange contact info with people you meet
  • Read news, and search attendees, events, and venues
• SitBy.Us
  • I’m not kidding, this lets you find where your friends are sitting at each panel. I haven’t used it, but this little piece of Star Trekkian-futurama sounds so useful.
• Tweetie 2
  • It costs $2.99, but you’ll save at least that much, what with the free beer (see #9). And it’s worth it, because Tweetie 2 has the works: lists, retweets, multiple accounts.
• Foursquare
  • You’ll drink the Kool-Aid by the end of SX, so you might as well go prepared.
• Facebook
  • So you can let your mom know your flight landed safely.
• Blogging apps
  
  • WordPress so you can blog while waiting in line
  • Image editing software for sprucing up your iPhone shots

3. Beg, borrow or steal a netbook

If you ain’t iPhone-enabled, you’ll want a connected device, but for God’s sake bring a netbook. I wept at the weight of my server-sized laptop more than once. There’s beautiful wifi everywhere in the conference centre, but don’t sit outside in the hot Texas sun to blog (however tempting it might be). I did this in ’09. overheated my motherboard, and spent a fortune on a long distance, roaming-charges fraught tech support call that ultimately left me lugging a blue-screened brick. Because they hung up on me.

4. Don’t get the Big Bag

As a marketer I know this is poor sportsmanship, and I get that sponsorship keeps costs down, but you don’t need the Big Bag. It’s a canvas tote with a groovy Adobe logo on it (and makes a dope grocery bag later), but it’s jam-packed with flyers and weighs a ton. Whatever one good freebie it may or may not contain is not worth lugging that thing around the entire first day, or the environmental guilt you’ll suffer tossing all that paper.

5. Carry ye olde school paper business cards

There’s nothing like the personal touch of trading cards with new contacts, especially if you’re traveling solo and looking for some nerd love. Take this opportunity to spiff up your blog or anything else you’ll be herding people towards with said cards. And check out Bump, a cute iPhone app that lets you bump your phone into the phones of cute boys and exchange contact info.

6. Ditch the dSLR

Unless you work for the Big Picture and are really married to depth of field, use a point ‘n’ shoot or your iPhone. dSlrs have 3 strikes against them: they`re expensive if you break or lose them, they’re heavy, and you can never whip them out and focus when the action’s going down. I’ve lugged a full-size professional video camera around that damn conference, and, I mean, just don’t.

7. The early bird gets good seats

Obsessive earliness about everything will get you a room across the street at a price you can afford, time for a leisurely crêpe & coffee breakfast, and phenomenal seats. Wear a watch if you have to.

8. Travel toothbrush + Colgate = your purse’s new BFF

You’ll have serious coffee breath at some point. Carry a mini bottle of Scope, too.

9. Don’t go pregnant

Beer is a fundamental component of both Austin & SX, and having to pass it up (sometimes it’s FREE!) is a drag. On the flip side, you may find the prevalence of hops revolting. Blogger Dooce was 5 months pregnant at the ’09 extravaganza, & she said the beer stench that passes for air in Austin made her physically ill. So try not to be conferencing for two if you can help it.

10. Schedule your bliss

You can use the tools to build yourself a kick-ass schedule, but how do you know what, from the dizzying array of options, to attend? You don’t want to miss anything great!

Follow your gut and attend things that sound cool to you. Don’t bore yourself with technology or industry-specific talks, if your eyes light up when you see something about community-building. I’ll never regret deciding on the fly to go see something that sounded funny and getting to experience the madness that is Eric Nakagawa, original pre-Ben Huh creator of I Can Haz Cheezburger. Or attending a talk with Hugh MacLeod and having a genuine Gaping Void cartoon on the back of a business card thrown at me, now framed in my studio.

SXSW  is about the culture of the web, so go to panels that define that for you. Trends and technology will leak into everything that happens, so focus on what gets you stoked. And have a blast for me

Who should “do” your social media? A totally general guide

The below are generalizations intended to help small to medium business owners get their feet wet in social media. There are brilliant exceptions to every rule.

You’re convinced. You heard social media marketing will be a $3 billion industry in the next five years. This is where it’s at. You’re all set to jump into a new decade with a totally techno, super digitally online cyber social media strategy, on the internet and everything. You’re going to listen, make friends, strike up conversations, the whole bit.

You look around your organization and wonder “who the heck is going to do our social media”?

There’s no universal right answer, but there’s a right answer for your company, for sure. It depends what you’re going to use social media for, and the answer to that might make the choice of mediator obvious (see “Customer Service). But barring an “everybody lives the brand, tweet as you will” Zappos-style strategy, you’re probably going to have to pick somebody (and if you’re a Tony Hsieh level-thinker, you don’t need to read any farther. Go innovate!).

Let’s start with a job description. What’s this future socializer going to do? They’re going to socialize! Fundamentally they’re going to make friends with other people and seek to help them out with their troubles, sometimes brand-related, and sometimes hopefully not. read more

What should you do with your advertising budget in 2010?

The spread of smartphones and location-aware mobile technology is opening up a (smaller) world of local marketing possibilities.

3 words: location, location, location. But we’ll get to that in a minute.

You’re the CEO, Senior VP of Marketing, and Chief Janitor of your very own local small business. You typically place an ad in the yellow pages, stuff a few dayglo flyers in mailboxes, and have a brochure website with an infrequently-updated ‘news’ section (because frankly, you can’t think of a whole lot of news with which to fascinate the public). You’ve heard of this new-fangled socialized media thing, but near as you can tell it’s all retired ladies stalking their in-laws and teenagers sending untoward photos to each other. But you also hear it costs less than fluorescent photocopies.

With major marketing superpowers like Pepsi skipping the superbowl and Coke basically declaring websites obsolete in order to refocus ad dollars on social media, Local Small Businessmen can safely assume the research is in, and traditional advertising isn’t. Social media is officially a great publicity channel. But what makes 2010 the year to dive in? read more

Ending up in conversation: what should you do if your organization can’t really use social media?

For the record, I like Speak Up Wpg’s use of social media. The opportunity it presents to speak to policymakers makes me feel like I come from a very with-it city. Their case study provides a jumping off point for talking about transparency. Go Peg.

Speak Up Winnipeg, a social media-driven public consultation city planning initiative here in the Peg, has just released its first report along with participation numbers. The blog/vlog-driven site boasts 535 registered users with over 1,600 posted comments. For a city of three quarters of a million, 535 users sounds low, but the quantity of comments of this vocal few speaks of passionate participation. The subject matter—the future of our city—is one of those contentious cans of worms that can make for great, if heated, public discourse, seemingly perfect for the social media milieu. More on that later.

On the participation side of things, I was dismayed initially that the the site required registration to comment, and indeed found login laziness to be an insurmountable barrier when I later lost my password. I’d recommend opening up comments; metrics could still be obtained from IP addresses. I realize misbehaviour rises in direct proportion with anonymity, but all conversational roadblocks should be removed if Speak Up is to “grow the number of people involved” as Mayor Sam Katz requests.
read more

Social search is going to change the web: A social media how-to guide for brands who want people to say nice things about them

Mmmk, I don’t think I fully grasped what social search meant for brands when I first wrote about it. A recent Altimeter post by Charlene Li, who I had the pleasure of seeing at last year’s SXSWi, really broke it down for me. It’s ok to be confused about this, because it’s a big jui jitsu match right now between the web’s sweatiest heavyweights, and when the dust settles the web will be fundamentally different.

So, while the eventual goal will be search results that are local and profile-based to some extent (your friends talking about what you’re interested in), the first deals between Twitter, Facebook, Bing* and Google will focus on real time trending topics and authority, meaning someone with a lot of followers (or fans, or friends, presumably) will come in at the top of the results, and people’s interactions with brands (good and bad) will spread like so much melted Cheez Whiz**.

For brands, companies, and organizations, this means less direct control over messaging than ever. Your own site pages will not necessarily be the most important results when the real-time web is elevated to equal status with the “brochure web”. The opinions tweeted by your customers/users/whoever wants to say anything about you will be very visible when people search you. Customer service is your new brand experience and the resulting word-of-mouth is your new advertising.

A moment to ponder Heather Locklear, here.

So what’s a poor org to do? How do we “make sure” people are saying nice things about us? read more