“Here’s to the Crazy Ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world – are the ones who DO!”
~ Apple Computers ~

The 1997 quote from the famous “Think Different” marketing campaign for Apple products might have been conceived to represent the elusive qualities of Apple product users, but it is also a very good description of Steve Jobs himself whose business philosophy and colorful life has been described in his biography written by Walter Isaacson.

Yes, I did read the 600+ pages of Steve’s life including the proud and not so proud moments both as a leader and as a family man. I saw him as a youngster who thought the rules did not apply to him, a young college drop-out who chose to study Buddhism rather than finish Reed College. I saw a young entrepreneur whose way to get what he wanted was by either yelling or sobbing uncontrollably in front of his business partners and finally I saw him as a powerful CEO whose way to approach difficult problems was to avoid them all together including avoiding his early cancer diagnosis that might have cost him his life. Was Steve Job’s way to get what he wanted right? Not exactly. Was it successful? You bet.

Knowing his unconventional way of management here are three leadership qualities that made me appreciate Steve Jobs regardless of his self-centered way of managing Apple as a business.

VISION

His early life experiences as a Zen Buddhist with a strong belief in the power of sublime minimalism contributed greatly to his understanding of himself as an artist and subsequently shaped his positioning of Apple as a company at the intersection of technology and humanity. His vision for Apple was to develop products whose simple user interface and graceful design would delight users of all ages. He witnessed how companies such as Microsoft were able to dominate the software market by developing and subsequently licensing their operating system to run on multiple 3^rd party platforms. Jobs was firmly against that approach. He wanted end-to-end control over the user experience which he achieved by limiting his software to run on Apple products and retaining full control over user experience both in terms of hardware and software.

Jobs not only believed in his vision but truly lived it through his actions: the way he build his team at Apple, the way he chose his business partners, the way he advertised his company…. heck, even the way he dressed and conducted himself at business meetings. There was no going half way. The way Jobs stood by his vision inspired his employees and commanded great respect from his business partners and even his competitors.  We need more leaders able to develop a clear vision and stand by it the way Jobs did.

FOCUS & DETERMINATION

“Pretend to be completely in control and people will assume that you are.”
– Nolan Bushnell who founded Atari, Inc.

Once Steve had his vision he was able to filter out distractions to make the path to success perfectly clear. When he took over Apple in 1997 and the company was on the brink of financial disaster he knew to eliminate all but a handful of key products & projects that matched his vision. That freed up resources and funds for Apple to survive and turn its finances around.

The book makes it obvious that Jobs did not tolerate “velvety” leaders that were afraid to offend others. He was direct and unfiltered which took some getting used to. He blamed President Obama’s unwillingness to upset others as his greatest weakness. He was equally direct and unfiltered with his top hires as he was with rank and file Apple employees.

Being a very intense man (at early age he thought himself how to stare at someone without blinking) he demanded nothing but full devotion from his employees that he hand-selected and considered his A-team. While his determination was widely considered extreme and even nicknamed Steve’s “Reality Distortion Field” most of his employees were willing to put up with it because he made them believe in things they never thought were possible and most importantly he helped them achieved the impossible.

PASSION FOR GREAT USER EXPERIENCE

“Some people say, ‘Give the customers what they want.’ But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!” People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.
– Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs did not invite users into his design studios. He never relied on market research and never crowd-sourced the ideation process. Instead, Jobs surrounded himself with top designers (incl. Pixar’s John Lasseter and Apple’s Jony Ive ) who appreciated his minimalist esthetics and followed his design simplicity. He and his team relied on themselves and their gut feeling to develop products that users did not even realize they needed such as iPod or iPhone.

“My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary.”
– Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs believed he created a company with “a deep current of humanity in [their] innovation” where “simplicity was the ultimate sophistication” and where great engineers similarly to great artists had a deep desire to express themselves. Because of Apple’s out-of-the box design approaches Steve was able to change entire industries: the music industry with iPod (1000 songs in your pocket) and iTunes that included pay-per-song music selling, the phone industry with iTunes store with 3^rd party apps, the retail industry with Apple stores and finally the publishing industry with iPad. Was it easy? Not at all. The book describes in great details the struggles Jobs went through to convince the music industry to break records into individual songs and to agree to sell them for 99 cents. There were other projects ready to be worked on including Job’s desire to re-shape the textbook industry by offering electronic versions of texbooks that were more interactive, easy to update and ultimately less expensive to purchase. Unfortunately he ran out of time to complete that project.

It was refreshing to see a CEO so focused and determined to make great user experience the leading theme in Apple’s vision. It paid off immensely with Apple becoming the most valuable brand in the world.

STEVE JOBS’ WINNING LEADERSHIP COMBO

1. Clear vision, 2. unwavering determination to execute on that vision and 3. great appreciation for top-notch design – this was Job’s winning leadership combo that caused a start-up in his parents garage to grow and change the world of business.  I recommend for every business leader and aspiring entrepreneur to pick up Walter Isaacson’s book. There is plenty to learn from this iCEO.

Jason Falls and Erik Deckers in their recent Entrepreneur.com article “How to Use Social Media for Research and Development” take a similar stand on empowering everyone marketers, product managers and small business owners to take advantage of data from social media conversations. How? They lists two major ways:

1)      REACTIVELY by using free or paid social data monitoring and mining tools to access, analyze and gather insights from existing conversations

2)      PROACTIVELY by seeking customer answers to direct questions posted in social channels.

Let’s analyze both from two different perspectives:  a small business owner’s point of view who often needs to rely on himself to perform all relevant research activities as well as a marketer in an enterprise setting who has an ongoing need for relevant customer insights that limited corporate market research resources cannot satisfy.

SOCIAL MEDIA DATA MINING

For access to social media data Jason & Erik give two examples of relevant tools: socialmention.com, a free social media data aggregator and uberVu.com a low cost social media engagement tool. Both of them allow you to type in a keyword or a keyword string  to pull out relevant conversations from a water hose of social data.

How successful you become with this data mining approach depends on your ability to refine your keywords to get relevant results and to look for patterns that might translate into future product improvements or a new product ideas. What are you looking for? Customer pain points & problems incl. existing product complaints, unmet needs and desires, behavioral patterns and solution inquiries. This data could be used to help understand customer behaviors that help you design a better product, develop a more relevant marketing campaign and proactively answer most common product questions that result in costly customer service inquiries.

In addition to the two services and approaches that Jason and Eric mentioned in the article I would also recommend services that allow you to set up alerts and receive notifications of relevant conversations on a regular basis so that you can continue to keep tabs and build on the original insights that you’ve gathered on day one. You can set up alerts in Socialmention.com as well as in google through google alerts.

If there is a particular social channels where your customers are more active in e.g. twitter vs. blogs or facebook vs. linkedIn there are specific channel-focused monitoring tools incl.

• technorati.com for blog searches,
• tweetgrid or advanced twitter search for twitter searches,
• Quirk.ly & Openbook for Facebook searches
• Boardtracker for user forums and board searches

Just keep in mind that social media data mining is not a short process. Defining and refining your keywords to get to relevant data takes time so don’t be discouraged when your early search results include lots of irrelevant content. If you are not familiar with how to use Boolean search operators to tighten your search queries here is a helpful Boolean operator tutorial (PDF) and another one that is a bit more advanced.

If you are a marketer in a large organization that has implemented a social media monitoring program you are already ahead of the game. How to gain access to the tool? I would start by inviting your social media monitoring program administrators for coffee and discuss your specific needs. Keep in mind that you are not looking for a branded company or product mentions that are customarily monitored as part of a brand reputation management program. You are looking for a different set of data which in many cases will require setting up new search queries and working to refine them to make sure data is relevant to your needs.

PROACTIVE ENGAGEMENT TO SEEK CUSTOMER FEEDBACK

Seeking customer feedback in social media is not as easy as sending a question out and expecting multiple responses in return. In order to have your customers or prospects willing to provide feedback you must have a pre- established relationship with them that is based on mutual trust established as part of a long term social media engagement strategy. Those of you who are already out there conversing with relevant audiences about their needs and pain points should adjust their social media tactics to make feedback giving a natural part of the engagement process. Think about questions you want to ask your customers ahead of time and include them in social polls, blog posts or tweets. Keep at it until you get the right amount of feedback to recognize patterns that can be further validated during a formal customer research.

If you are lucky and work for a company that actively crowd-sources their customers for feedback on product ideation you might have a public or private online forum with formal tools to make it easier to solicit customer feedback. These tools help users comment on ideas  and  help  “promote” or “demote” with a simple click of a button. Here are a few examples of such communities you should visit to understand who is talking and what the major data patters are.

• B2C
• My Starbucks Idea
• Sara Lee Open Innovations

• B2B
• Salesforce Idea  Exchange
• Pitney Bowes Business Insight Ideas Community (disclosure: I work for Pitney Bowes)

• B2B and B2C
• Dell Idea Storm

Regardless of what company you work for and research resources you have at your disposal keep in mind that social media is the world’s largest focus group and it is to your advantage to learn the basics of social media listening and social data mining. As Jason & Eric smartly point out you must start with the basics:

1. Have  clearly defined research goals  (what are you trying to find out),
2. Think of a strategy for getting you there (incl. questions you need to be asking to elicit the right type of feedback)
3. Determine free or paid tools you’ll need to gather and analyze data and that will allow you to receive that data on a regular basis.

Good luck!

Change Is the New Normal

Did I take courses that would prepare me to be a social media strategist for a B2B company? Not exactly. During my college years “tweeting” had nothing to do with 140 characters. I did what I thought was my professional calling (applied linguistics) followed by what I thought was my second professional calling (business management) and that evolved into my third professional calling (web design) and after that it became clear to me that “change” was my calling as I continued to add professional skills to my portfolio (human computer interaction certificate…). How do I explain this to my 18-year-old who wants to have his career choice figured out by the time our phone conversation is over? Hmmm…

As I evaluate my career choices a prediction coming from Altimeter’s research on the future of the social strategist career path does not appear as scary: the role of a social media specialist/strategist will “fade into the background as social technologies become a ubiquitous communication channel among consumers and companies.” I agree knowing that this position just like the rest of my career will evolve. What will continue to make me and other social media strategists marketable is the combination of skills I gained throughout my career including hard skills: web design, Information Architecture, web publishing, marketing analytics and soft skills including leadership, project management and most importantly constant learning!

So Lukas, go ahead and make plans for what right now appears to be the right career choice for you, but leave plenty of room for change as the new normal.

Social Media Strategist Career Trades

Votier Creative came up with this great infographic based on Altimeter’s research of what it takes to be a social media strategist.

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VIDEOS

You cannot go wrong energizing your participants with some upbeat music & cleverly along with visuals. Here are the powerful three I keep on using over and over

Social Media Revolution  -the basics – use these powerful stats to explain the basics concept behind social media

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Social Media Revolution in Business – yes, it has the powerful ROI stats there

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Social Media for Marketers – short and sweet (and narrated by a guy with a cute British accent

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CARTOONS

What will make folks remember important concepts better than laughing at others doing it wrong! Here are a couple great social media cartoons that work well to illustrate basic social media concepts

Lack of Social Media Strategy  – shared by Valeria Maltoni

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Engagement in Social Media -courtesy of Tom Fishburne

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SPACIAL (vs. Linear) PRESENTATION TOOLS

Prezi rocks!

I have used this powerful spacial way of focus users attention on several occasions to present concepts without relying on a linear style that PowerPoint forces you to stick to. Here is my “blogging for communicators” presentation designed in prezi:

Bob presented his information strategy framework to include

1. Identifying your business goals
2. Identifying your audiences
3. Figuring out the information types you are going to share with your audience
4. Lastly picking your channels to facilitate info. delivery

His info. strategy would follow this basic template

” We deliver the right info (aka content model) to the right people (your audiences) the right way (through appropriate channel/s) to meet our goals (aka business goals).”

The addition of social media conversations revises his strategy template to now mention information exchanges.

“We deliver the right content or facilitate information exchanges for the right people in the right way to help us meet our business goals.”

In a way this strategy building framework reminded me of Forrester’s POST methodology that I have been advocating when helping my stakeholders build their social media strategies at Pitney Bowes (my employer)

Forrester's POST methodology

But what I’d like to share with you here is Bob’s laser sharp focus on better understanding the conversations themselves incl.

1. Who is speaking (creating content or originating conversations)
2. Who is listening to these conversations aka paying attention to them?
3. Who is responding to these conversations?

Bob’s questions reminded me of a similar way of classifying conversations coming from Forrester called the Social Media Ladder of Engagement

Forrester Social Media Ladder of Engagement

Or a slightly amended Pyramid of engagement coming from Altimeter.

Altimeter's Social Media Engagement Piramid

But Bob went further identifying users we are dealing with in social networks incl.

• What types of conversations are they currently participate in?
• 1 to 1 (e.g. instant messenger)
• 1 to many (e.g. Twitter)
• Many to many (sync) – e.g. a chat room
• Many to many (async) e.g. Facebook

• What kind of communicators do THEY want to be?
• What do they want to talk about ?
• Do they want to originate these conversations?

• What kind of conversation participants do YOU wan them to be?

• What channels would be best to have these conversations in?

• What will it cost you to change the way they communicate?

As someone who went through similar audience identification exercises I attest how difficult it has been to shift an audience from being listeners to responders or speakers. It takes lots of resources and quite a bit of determination that you need to consider BEFORE you follow that path.

How do you engage with these different conversation participants?

Listeners need to be informed
If your users are predominantly listeners your job is to concentrate on delivering the best quality content to them while being credible, authoritative, logical and passionate in channels you choose for your content delivery.

Responders need to be facilitated
If your users are responders to content posted by you or others the biggest question for you is how you and your organization gets ready to deal with these responses incl. sustainable listening workflows, the ability to respond back to their comments and rewarding their participation.

Speakers need to be promoted
If your users are speakers Bob’s advice is to concentrate on promoting these content creators so that they develop a long-lasting relationships with you. Promoting them would include

• Helping them better facilitate their conversations
• Making sure they receive recognition for their work (aka their work is attributed to them)
• Improving their social status (aka advancing good speakers)
• Promoting their good ideas

The biggest take-away from Bob’s workshop was how important audience analysis is to your information delivery/exchange strategy. The more you know about your audience and their willingness to converse with you the more successful your social strategies are going to be.

Here comes another funny acronym Katie coned to help us understand the R in Social Media ROI. It’s KBI which stands for Kick Butt Index. According to Katie the beginning of every successful social media measurement starts with identification of your goals (the R in ROI). If we want to “kick butt” we need to know what “kick butt” means. Are we expected to:

• Improve positioning in our specific marketplace
• Communicate key messages
• Increase brand advocacy
• Increase engagement in the brand
• Demonstrate thought leadership
• Increase customer satisfaction
• Improve company’s reputation
• Bring in qualified leads

Have you noticed that the above list of goals has nothing to do with social media? These are business-specific goals. Knowing them and agreeing on which ones are key will help you determine what KPIs you need to measure in social media to prove success. It often happens in large enterprises that these overarching goals get lost in translation or get misinterpreted or misunderstood. Your job BEFORE committing to executing a social media program is to clearly identify what overarching business goal(s) that you will be contributing to and identify your KPIs accordingly.

If your goal is to increase engagement in the brand the KPI’s Katie recommends:

1. % increase in Engagement Index (time on site/repeat visits/pages per visit)
   OR Conversations Index (ratio of posts to comments)
2. % increase in registrations/requests for information
3. % increase in influence rankings for corp. bloggers & twitterers
4. % increase in membership in company’s communities

If your goal is to communicate key messages KPI’s for this goal should be

1. % of conversations containing one or more key messages
2. Decline in cost per messages communicated (budget divided by message appearances)
3. % increase in awareness and credibility of key messages (through brand survey)

There are way more funny acronyms and visually interesting proof-points behind KBI in Katie Paine’s book “Measuring what Matters.”

This post was influenced by Katie Paine’s presentation titled “Media is the Metrics“  at Connecticut Social Media Breakfast meeting in Hamden, CT.

A few weeks back I was fortunate to listen to a panel discussion at the Connecticut Social Media Breakfast meeting with three queens of social media measurements: Katie Paine from KDPaine & Partners, Jenifer Zeszut of Lithium Technologies (former CEO of Scout Labs) and Genevieve Coates from Radian6. (Trust me, the air of the auditorium at the Quinnipiac University was so saturated with insights that it was literaly hard to breathe.) All of these women spend significant amount of time every day coaching their clients how to gain insights from social media monitoring and subsequently how to measure the effect of clients’ engagement to respond to these insights.

Social Media Engagement Journey

During the panel, Jenifer Zeszut talked about five stages of social media engagement that she calls the Social Engagement Journey. The farther you are on the engagement journey the more advanced your social media monitoring and measurement needs are.

It usually starts with the PR department concerned with brand reputation management who ends up to be the first in line to monitor social media to find and fight PR fires. Following the PR department there is the marketing group who quickly (or in some instance not so quickly) realizes that in order to gain maximum value out of social media engagement they need to monitor social media to build relationships and grow social media fans – the essence of Word of Mouth marketing. The customer support department is not far behind wanting to access social media monitoring tools in order to support customers who demand multi-channel customer service 24/7. But what truly separates the leaders from the rest of the corporate social media adopters is phase 4 and 5 where in phase 4 social media is viewed as a revenue driver and social media monitoring is needed to support this quest with metrics that prove social media generates revenue. And finally phase 5, where social media is there to prove true customer centricity through customer crowd-sourcing for innovation and  product co-creation.

What to monitor in Social Media?

Not every piece of data is actionable to every group that needs to listen to social media conversations. While we tend to start setting up our monitoring dashboards by concentrating on our company’s branded keywords, there is more insights to be gained by expanding the keywords and data streams to include competitive intelligence, industry-relevant keywords and more. Here is the basic template I follow when setting up dashboards for individual corporate functions.

PR: detecting influencers & engaging with them, monitoring for brand reputation issues & quickly assessing crises

Marketing: detecting super fans & engaging with them, monitoring health of individual social media campaigns

Customer Support: detecting unhappy customers talking about having issues with individual products & services

Commerce/Sales: gathering competitive intelligence, real-time detection of prospects looking for solutions, prospect nurturing

Product Development: listening for new product ideas, product “wishes,” customer pain-points

Business Development: competitive intelligence, industry insights

Does your corporate social media engagement journey follows Jenifer’s schema?

What insights do you watch for in your social media monitoring programs?

While we go through changes in the way we create, distribute & consume content online blogging for me continues to be one of the most effective ways to establish and maintain my permanent presence digitally. As such, I would never consider abandoning it in favor of snack-sized content publishing platforms. What I do instead is to look for ways channels can complement one another and work in concerts as part of a well maintained digital hub.

One of my favorite corporate blogging gurus Debbie Weil recently gave a talk as part of the Blogging Success Summit 2011. The topic of her presentation was “Leveraging Your Blog as a Social Media Hub” . According to Debbie (and I agree with her POV), your blog is your digital “castle”, your permanent digital space where you control the content and where you set your own rules. The rest of the social media ecosystem is “borrowed territory” where content exchanges might be more frequent and more real-time, but where they are harder to find and consume overtime.

The trick to your social media publishing success is not to eliminate any one of your digital channels in favor of the other, but to use them in concert leveraging the best features each one has to offer. While your blog continues to be your thought leadership content repository, it only works when others can find it. That’s where other social media channels come in that make it easy for you to draw attention to your blog (e.g. Twitter) and to engage in near-real-time conversation with your digital tribe (e.g. LinkedIn groups).

So enough already with the eminent death of blogging. As far as I see it we are just now getting started.

If you are interested in reading 32 experts’ (incl. Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, David Meerman Scott along with corporate bloggers and blog managers, including yours truly responses to the question “Why Your Blog is Your Social Media Hub” see Debbie Weil’s free ebook.

Debbie Weil's eBook titled: "Why Your Blog Is Your Social Media Hub."

Access Debbie Weil’s “Why Your Blog is Your Social Media Hub” eBook (PDF)

If you’ve ever been to a MarketingProfs event you know that it is a great networking opportunity first and foremost. I took advantage of it and had lengthy discussions with Steve Woodruff about opportunities for social media in pharma and healthcare industries and discussed content marketing strategies with Jeffrey Cohen, the editor of the Social Media B2B blog.

So what left the biggest impression for me at this year’s conference? – you ask. Well, several things including the abundance of QR codes popping up in handouts, callouts, napkins, books pages and other physical objects spotting of which was followed by many conversations regarding how to use QR codes for marketing and customer loyalty programs. And rightfully so QR codes are finaly taking off in America with most recent survey from Mobio showing a 1200% increase in QR code usage in the last 3 months of 2010.

What are QR codes?

A lot of great articles including Jeff Korhan’s recent blog in Social Media Examiner & a an earlier one from Mashable go over the QR codes basics, so I will happily refer you to them regarding the history of QR codes, adoption rates and so on. Here I will just list the basics.

• QR codes (as well as their cousins Microsoft Tags, Datamatix, etc.) are two-dimensional codes that can be generated easily (and for free) and displayed for anyone to scan with their smart phones.
• QR codes  enable easy connections between physical objects and the digital world.
• To read a QR code you must have a special application called a QR Reader.
• By scanning a QR code with your mobile phone you can link to a URL, bookmark (favorite), text, phone number, SMS or a vCard (contact)

Examples of QR code Implementation

Despite a small (but fast growing) adoption rates of consumers familiar with the QR code technology in the US, we are seeing an explosion in creative uses of QR codes to connect consumers to digital content while they are away from their computers, but have access to their smart phone. Here are some I fund particularly appealing

Print-to-digital transition

Jay Baer and Amber Naslund incorporated Microsoft Tag ( QR codes’ cousin) as part of their “the Now Revolution” book making it easy for readers to seamlessly transfer from print to a digital experience in order to provide extra value to the readers in terms of links to web pages or accessing additional resources that are easier to consume digitally.

MS Tag code displayed as part of Jay Bear and Amber Naslund “The Now Revolution” book

QR for Advertising

What makes QR codes exceptional for advertising is the fact that the recipients of the advertising message are invited to interact with the ad instead of passively consuming its content.

At Marketing Profs conference we saw several uses of QR codes as part of the booth display inviting attendees to scan codes to view additional info, watch videos or enter to win prizes.

Vendor table at the MarketingProfs Digital Forum in Austin, TX

Trada, a crowd-sourced SEM company, made sure no one missed their innovative use of QR codes to promote their business at MarketingProfs event – their QR code was printed directly on napkins used by event attendees throughout the event. Clever!

QR code on a napkin spotted at
the MarketingProfs Digital Forum event

The Grammys have used QR Codes to promote the 53rd annual music awards event on the streets and in subway stations of New York City taking users to an online experience to listen to 30 second snippets of selected songs and vote for their favorite tunes.

Image courtesy of 2D Barcode Strategy blog

A clever example of using QR codes by small businesses comes from Google’s Favorite Place campaign for which Google teamed up with 100,000 local small businesses such as restaurants to promote their business by displaying large decals with QR codes in their store windows. By scanning the QR code patrons were sent to the Google Mobile directory page for that small business where they could read reviews and other helpful info.

Image courtesy of Putting Dots on Pape

Have you ever drove by a “house for sale” sign with a telephone number and the name of the agent listed as part of the sign. What did you do? You stopped to write these details down or at least made a mental note of the real estate agency and the road so you look the house up online when you got home. What if the agent added a QR code as part of the “for sale” sign. No more waiting until you got home. You could scan the code and gain instant access to a full array of property details without waiting.  UPDATE: As noted by Steve OConnor in comments the image below shows a Datamatrix code, not a QR code. The world of two-dimensional codes is definitely getting fragmented

image courtesy of R and D Images

Let’s think big, really big… How about placing a QR code on all products in supermarkets allowing consumers to access nutritional information, recipes and any other pertinent product info. It’s already wide spread in Japan and other Asia Pacific countries. I have not seen a QR code on a supermarket shelf in Connecticut but the creator of the “2D Barcode Strategy” blog did and commented on the experience which should be a warning to all CPG companies to not simply slap a QR code on a packaging of the product or a store shelf advertising, but to think about the consumer experience once they scan the QR code.

Images courtesy of 2 Barcode Strategy

Best Buy has really embraced QR codes in a consumer-friendly way by including QR codes on their in-store product price tags as well as weekly sales flyers delivered to consumers with your Sunday newspaper. The goal: make it easier for shoppers to access extra product info. (in store) or  to complete the purchase online (store flyer).

And finally Ebay is experimenting with QR codes on busses to encourage passengers to do a little shopping to kill time while commuting. Very smart!

Image courtesy of the Mr. Tunes blog

QR codes do not need to be displayed on physical objects such as collateral, store windows or busses. They can be shown on television screens as part of a broadcast. The Weather channel is taking advantage of it by displays large QR codes during their weather broadcast to entice users to download their mobile weather map. Brilliant.

QR codes for customer care

Want to be paper-free while traveling? QR code saved to your smart phone can easily replace your boarding pass. In the US Continental and American Airlines are using them already to free their passengers from caring paper boarding passes.

(Image courtesy of Into Mobile)

QR codes for job seekers

Recently I have been asked to help evaluate candidates for an open position with my employer. We received dozens of resumes but only one of them included a QR code clearly visible on the front page. Guess which resume I looked at first?

I am looking forward to reading reports that show results of QR-code enabled campaigns. As with all web-enabled marketing effors consumers’ interations withQR-codes can be monitored and reported on including scan rates, time on site, navigation paths and most importantly conversions.

Have you seen any interesting implementations of QR codes for marketing or customer service? Share them in comments.