These funny looking codes seem to be popping up everywhere at the moment. Although still relatively new to the mainstream world, usage is definitely on the rise with apparently 1200 percent increase in scanning from July to December in 2010. (source: JumpScan)
QR (Quick Response) codes are basically a 2-dimensional code that can hold a lot of information in just one small graphic. This can be read by most smart phones to display text, links or other information making the connection between offline and online worlds easier.
QR codes are huge in Japan and are used in various ways such as purchasing products to check-in users to locations.
The potential for QR codes is limitless and it seems like QR Codes are finally catching on over here. Here are a few examples I’ve come across online:
‘Hidden Sounds’ QR Code
Right Now QR Scavenger Hunt at SXSW. Players must find RightNow runners wearing black t-shirts that say #theGame_SXSW on the front and with a QR Code on the back. To get further clues and proof that you’ve found a Runner players have to use twipic to send a picture to #theGame_SXSW. To win players have to be quick, creative and follow the rules.
FirstBank QR codes – in a ‘novel’ giveaway
Engaging billboard displays featuring QR codes that offered free books, Sudoko, and crossword puzzles with specific messaging that explained to travelers how to access the free content.
I recently went to a social media content strategy session titled ‘ Publish or Be Damned Or…How brands have to start being useful if they want to remain relevant’ presented by Matthew Yeomans*. It was a useful session and I’ve put together my notes to share some key points with you.
This session was about how brands are starting to realise that Content = social media currency. Matthew explained this by using working examples from brands that have understood that they’ve got stories to tell (that cannot be told through website) and a social media audience eager to listen and engage. These brands have been successful because they think like a publisher by first investing in finding out what type of information their target audience care about and then work out how they as a brand can serve that need.
Main points:
Listen: Be where your customers are, listen to them and know the content they care about. Be Useful!
Understand: understand your community first then establish the ongoing editorial dialogue.
Create & converse: Start thinking like a publisher – what content works where, when? Understand what is possible with the medium: content that might work well on channel doesn’t necessarily fit on others example: The Rocky Mountain News Twitter a funeral
Other:
Move beyond campaigns: social media on campaign by campaign basis doesn’t make sense to customers. As taken from Dell’s Adam Brown presentation ‘It’s like going out with someone on a date for a couple of months. You get hot and heavy with them and then you never call…’
Take away points: (copied from Matthew presentation)
- Use social media to understand audience
- Create content that is useful to audience needs
- Pace that content on an ongoing basis
- Measure quality not numbers to demonstrate how editorial builds brand value
- Show clients how being a social media publisher is relevant throughout the business
*Matthew Yeomans (@mateoy) is director of Custom Communication, a social content company and a former journalist for Time, The Industry Standard and Wired.
That’s all. Let me know what you think by leaving a comment.
Thank you for always being there for me. I’m sorry for not telling how much you mean to me before now. From our first chat at work about SEO and Social I knew that I had found someone special (and geeky like me) who loved what they do and were genuinely passionate about their work.
More importantly, you were a good friend. A special person that I trust and respect!
Your words of wisdom and believe in me helped me through some of the toughest times.
You always cheered me up and the sad news I got today about what happened to you yesterday is really hard to believe.
I will always remember you by at the end of your emails.
You will be missed my thoughts go out to your wife and family RIP…
I recently read a Forrester research by Augie Ray about ROI of Social media marketing. It’s about using a balanced score card approach for measuring social media activities. Using this method to measure marketing activities is probably nothing groundbreaking and one that I am sure some of you have seen before in social or other marketing context.
Still, I believe that this report will be useful for anyone wanting to measure the value of social media programs and tools in way that delivers the entire picture. Therefore I have summarized the research and put together key points/learning for your attention.
The key point(s) are:
1. ROI has an established and understood meaning – it is a financial measure, not a synonym for the word ‘results’. Look beyond financial measures to seek the value of social activities since many benefits delivered by social are not easily measured in £££. Marketers who promise ROI may be setting expectations that cannot be delivered by social measures.
2. Avoid using proxies to put financial value to nonfinancial metrics such as likes, tweets, followers, blog comments and positive reviews as that often just lead to inaccurate evaluation of activities when planning long-term.
3. A wide range of metrics both directly and indirectly financial should be used to fully capture the value delivered by social media activities.
According to Augie Ray: to properly show the impact of social media you should align objectives, metrics, and targets across four perspectives: Financial, Digital, Brand and Risk management.
Financial: Has the revenue or profit increased or cost decreased?
- Works best for direct response marketing or for ecommerce sites with social functionality.
- Measure increase in conversion, revenues per sale, easy to track using trackable URLs and adserver tags.
Other things also measurable include:
- Measure improved promotion response rates with social embedded commerce.
Example: Social eCommerce company Alvenda has implemented eCommerce-enabled news posts on facebook for brands such as 1-800-Flowers. Alvenda now reports that eCommerce-enabled news feed post drive 18.4 times more sales per impression than web site links posted in newsfeed.
Digital: Has the company enhanced its owned and earned digital assets?
- Measure gains in owned media (such as company website, communities and blogs) and earned media (mentions the company receives or creates in social channels like facebook/twitter, third-party blogs, and forums).
- Measure social media program impact on search engine relevance – search visibility.
- Measure traffic to and beside owned media to track all brand touch points – video and get a better idea for what works/content wise
Example: Razorfish recently demonstrated improvements to Levi Strauss & Co.’s earned assets by measuring fans and views. Levi sponsors a stage area at the annual music/film festival SXSW called Levi’s FADER Fort that is a popular spot for up and coming music artists and their fans. To capitalize on this Levi’s added new features to its facebook page such as live streaming video along with offering free passes to the FADER Fort exclusive to fans on facebook. This effort resulted in a 50% increase in Levi’s facebook fans and 780,000 views of the live stream.
Brand: Have consumer attitude about the brand improved?
- Surveys to find out change in attitude.
- Buzz report or audit to analyze sentiment.
- Measure Brand advocates, self-moderators, total fans vs. Total active fans.
Example: P&Gs ‘Let her jump’ petition to let Lindsey Van and other female ski jumpers compete in the 2014 Winter Olympics. This campaign was implemented on P&Gs antiperspirant brand Secret to create social relevance and build a fan base. An online survey of facebook users and Nielsen Brand List survey was used to measure and discover the belief among target audience that Secret deodorant works better than other deodorants increased 8 points and purchase intent jumped 11%.
Risk management: Is the organization better prepared to note and respond to attacks or problems that affect reputation?
It is difficult to put a value against this but online communities you create across the social web are assets your brand can use when challenges arise and therefore minimize the cost of PR crisis. To put a value on this you would need to look at decreased cost of PR crisis on long-term basis. I will try and research an example and share with you (hopefully soon).
I hope that this summary has provided you with a broader overview of how to measure the impact of social media activities. Let me know how you get on by leaving a comment.
We’re in the real early days of location-based marketing, but examples of brands and application developers experimenting with places have started to emerge.
Here are 3 examples of facebook places integration for marketing that highlight simplicity and low cost options available for brands wanting to use social media to reach, engage and reward their loyal customers.
1. NIKE sportswear fake burritos campaign using facebook places…
Nike sportswear recently surprised fans by giving free jacket packaged in the form of a burrito to fans that checked into a branded taco truck near Portland University. Fans and followers of @nikesportswear on Twitter received messages about a new item ‘Destroyer Burritos’. They were then instructed to request this item at the truck ones ‘checked in’ with facebook places. Check out the video to see the result:
I like this idea because of its simplicity and for the fact that once again Nike are among first to use a new functionality like facebook places for marketing and therefore gain extra buzz and attention online from blogs/trade press for being cutting edge.
2. Fan Appz to reward fans that check in via facebook places…
A shopping mall in the US recently offered a 15 percent discount on clothing or a chance to win Jonas Brothers concert tickets to customers who checked into the mall via facebook places. Now this is not the most groundbreaking example but the reason I am highlighting this here is because of the application they used to implement this. The application is called ‘Fan Appz’ and costs ca $50 per month for premium option which allows fan page admins to create promotions to reward ‘loyal’ fans. The loyalty of a fan is decided based on fans taking particular action on facebook like share, comment or by ‘checking in’ to ‘places’. Page admins can tap into further options and only allow fans that are eligible to unlock the voucher. This is great for brands that only wish to reward fans by age/sex etc. Besides creating these promotion vouchers, site admin can also view check in data to measure popularity.
3. Reward loyal fans through LotaltyBuilder.
Last example is from Irish application developers BetaPond who’ve recently released a couple of facebook places integrated applications. But the one I would like to focus on today is called loyaltyBuilder. This is a multi-venue ‘check in’ leader board tab application. This is great for businesses with multiple physical locations as businesses can use this to encourage users to check in to specific Places. There is a competitive element to this application too as fans that check in on regular basis are awarded with points shown on the leader board and you can reward these fans for loyalty and thereby encourage others to follow. I don’t have price details for this app but I am sure you will be able to get some sort of guidelines if you contact them directly.
I hope these 3 examples have inspired you a bit and demonstrated that incorporating location-based marketing does not need to be costly or overly complicated.
Thanks for reading and feel free to comment, like and share.
After some months of hype, facebook ‘places’ has finally been unveiled (in the US anyway).
As a social media marketer I am interested to find out how marketers can use this new functionality for marketing.
But lets first start with the basics:
What is facebook ‘places’?
This is a location-based functionality that facebook users could use to share their location, find out who’s nearby in real time and discover new places around them as you can on foursquare and Gowalla (if you’re already using that). Unlike foursquare and Gowalla this is just a location engine, so no gaming features like mayor/badges and stamps/pins.
What’s so special about that?
Geo location services have been around for some time now, however, facebook integration exposes this functionality to its 500 milion users across the globe and by doing so they’ve increased the importance a notch or two.
Facebook says that this ‘new’ functionality will enable users to take advantage of unexpected coincidences like for example discovering that your mate is at same festival or that one of your contacts is at the bar down the road and so forth.
What are the marketing opportunities available with using ‘places’?
1. Organic Impressions – everytime someone ‘checks in*’ to your ‘place’, that news is published on their wall and friends newsfeed bringing your brand ‘place’ in to the attention of other possible customers.
2. Discounts/offers – Besides from offering straightforward discount offers to customers who’ve checked in to your place you could quite simply use this to create some noise around your business/product launch. For example: A retailer like bodyshop could use this during their VIP nights and get customers to ‘check in’ to access a prize or discount and in doing so increase brand mentions on facebook. Other example could be to enhance airport ‘priority/VIP’ boarding experience by allowing fans that ‘check in’ to your place have access to VVIP boarding and create some positive buzz noise on facebook.
3. Applications – application developers can integrate location features into mobile/facebook/website applications to create a range of social experiences. Imagination is your only limit! Here are a few examples already being discussed:
- A travel application that gives people the ability to see which of their friends have already been to the place they are visiting.
- A conference application that makes it easy for attendees to find colleagues and connect with them.
- An event application that enables attendees to see where their friends are at a concert’ (source: facebook developers’ blog http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/403)
Cool I’m sold! How do I get started?
All you need to do is to list or claim your place, don’t worry it is easy to get started!
Just follow this link: http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=18365. After you’ve submitted your claim and it has been verified by facebook, then users will be able to check in from that location.
Other advantage about claiming your places is that you’ll be able to manage your place details like address, contact, opening hours and upload pictures and make sure that correct information is being communicated to your customers on facebook. You’ll also be able to ‘merge’ your ‘place’ with your facebook fanpage.
Measuring ‘check in’ data
This is pure speculation, but I wouldn’t be surprised if ‘check in’ data would be available in facebook fanpage insight dashboard when you merge it with your facebook place. I haven’t managed to find any official mentions about this but it just makes sense for them enable this.
If you already measure fan interaction (likes, page views, comments etc) on your facebook fan page than data you’ll collect from users ‘checking in’ could add further value to that insight which will hopefully lead to better understanding of your customers and their needs.
Users who check in will be able to leave feedback/review of your place. This information will be useful feedback for any business who wants to improve customer service or to further develop a product.
Okay, that’s all on places for now. I’m sure I’ll report more on this soon. I would to love to hear your feedback, please feel free to comment, add your marketings tips!
*WTF is check in: That’s basically when someone shares that they are at a place. They would need to click a check in button to share this information.
I want to disable ‘places’ for my private profile! HELP
Okay, don’ worry! Here is a video explaining how you could disable facebook places for your profile:
You should know that when someone checks in, they could also tag friends who are with them like you can tag a friend in a status update or photo. If you don’t want your friends to be able to do that than you can disable that by following the instructions in the above video.
All work and no fun is starting to get boring! But this weekend it has been all about our little garden at home. Earlier in spring we planted loads of herbs and vegetables and now we started to harvest…here are a few photos from ‘my little urban garden’…enjoy!
I heard about Quilliant.com for the first time earlier this week through one of the site founders. It’s an online writing community managed by writers to help support, encourage and engage with each other. I quite like the idea and although I’m not a professional writer I enjoy writing poems now and again and have applied to join the test panel. The full site will launch soon, but anyone can join beta testing now by signing up here: http://www.quilliant.com/login/beta.loginform.php
Check out this short video about Quilliant.com for more info.
I will let you know how I get on in the coming months.
www.bagtheweb.com was recommended to me by one of my new work mates. It’s simply ‘virtual bags’ you can create, label and insert with links and create an organized resource for your topic of interest, share expertise and recommend content. Other users can view your virtual bags, follow profile, comment etc. I’m finding this quite useful! I know some people who’ve created bags with recipes, but being the nerd I am of course the one I’ve created is all about social media.
You can check it out here: http://bagtheweb.com/u/teamsocial/bags
I would love to hear your feedback, good or bad, I’m keen to know what you think…ta
Players must find RightNow runners wearing black t-shirts that say #theGame_SXSW on the front and with a QR Code on the back. To get further clues and proof that you’ve found a Runner players have to use twipic to send
a picture to #theGame_SXSW. To win players have to be quick, creative and follow the rules.
at the end of your emails.
