Have You Taken the QR Codes Journey?

It is a good bet that you’re starting to see QR Codes everywhere. They look like bar codes, or crazy jigsaw puzzles, sometimes in color, but most often in black-and-white. They are on magazine advertisements, posters and billboards, business cards, and just about everywhere else. 

   

QR stands for quick response, and they act as mobile shortcuts to websites, discount coupons, videos, and other content. Point at them with your smartphone, snap a picture of the code and you are zipped to a video, a web page, and contact info, and more. A static medium suddenly turns into a dynamic, interactive one. 

Actually, although many folks are just being exposed to QR Codes, the codes themselves have been around for years. QR Codes were first created by Toyota subsidiary Denso Wave in 1994. Since that time, they have been extensively used in Japan and Europe too. Now their use is exploding in the United States. 

   

In our immediate gratification culture, QR Codes may just be the Holy Grail, because they capture viewers’ interest at the very moment it is piqued. SEE. SNAP. VIEW! You’re not asking folks to manually input URLs, or write anything down. Plus, QR Codes cost little or nothing to add to your print campaigns.  And, it gets better; they’re trackable, because these codes resolve to Internet sites. QR Codes are an efficient (AKA EASY) way to track the interest level of many of today’s mobile consumers. 

   

Maybe adding QR Codes will help add the “WOW” factor to marketing collateral? Or, bridge the gap and connect print to the web? And, even increase the relevance of print among younger consumers? I think you should be thinking QR Codes! 

Is Twitter Changing the Way We Live?

Twitter has really and truly (sigh!) developed into a powerful form of communication.

So, what does its growth say about us, and the future of American innovation? Let’s start with what a terrible first impression it makes. Seriously, why would “followers” really care or even want to know Oprah’s choice in breakfast cereal in real time no less?! Is it (strangely) satisfying to get a glimpse of their daily routines?

Millions of devotees have discovered that Twitter turns out to have unsuspected depth. We don’t think it at all moronic to start a phone call with a friend by asking how their day is going. Twitter gives you the same information without your even having to ask. Maybe the social warmth of all those stray details shouldn’t be taken lightly. There is no doubt that we have embraced and expanded Twitter at an extraordinary speed.  Breakfast-status updates turned out to be more interesting than we thought!

The more interesting news with Twitter, however, is how we’ve bent the system to do things that its creators never dreamed of – i.e. what is fascinating about Twitter is not what it’s doing to us. It’s what we’re doing to it.

Open Conversation – changing the rules of engagement for a small, private event, for example. Adding a second layer of discussion, if you will, and bringing a wider audience into what would have been a private exchange. Also, it gives the event an afterlife on the Web. OK, building it entirely out of 140-chararter messages, but the sum total of tweets adds up to something substantive.

Super-Fresh Web – as a social network, Twitter revolves around the principle of followers. Users publish tweets. The character limit allows tweets to be created and circulated via the SMS platform used by most mobile devices. (The basic mechanics are remarkably simple.) Now, here is the cool part. Put the three elements together – social networks, live searching and link-sharing – and you have what amounts to a very interesting alternative to Google’s (near monopoly) in searching. Twitter is more an efficient supplier of the super-fresh Web than Google. If you’re looking for articles / sites devoted to LeBron James, you search Google. If you’re looking for interesting comments from your extended social network about the three-pointer King James just made 30 seconds ago in Miami, you go to Twitter.

End-User Innovation – One of the most telling facts about the Twitter platform is that the vast majority of its users interact with the service via software created by third parties. There are dozens of applications created by enterprising coders or small start-ups that let you manage Twitter feeds. Services that help you upload photos. And, as the tools have multiplied, we’re discovering extraordinary things to do with them. Just look at the Middle East, or how widely Twitter is used among political activists in China that the government blocked access to it.

The weather reports keep announcing that the sky is falling, but here we are – millions of us – sitting around trying to invent new ways to talk to one another. It’s entirely possible that three or four years from now, we’ll have moved on from Twitter. But the key elements of the Twitter platform will preserve. Every major channel of information will be Twitterfied.

Resource: Time, 06.15.09, graph: thenextweb

Y U Luv Texts, H8 Calls?

Research indicates that we want to reach others, but not to be interrupted. Consider this information from Pew Research and the Nielsen Co.:

• Adults Who Text – 84% of text-messaging adults say that send and receive texts “just to say hello.”
• The Phone at Night – Two-thirds of adults sleep with their cellphones next to their bed.
• Cut the Land Line – 23% of Americans have only a cellphone, and NO land line for making calls.
• Making Contact – 17% of cellphone-owning adults say they have physically bumped into a person or object while talking or texting.
• Shorter Calls – The length of the average cellphone call FELL to 3.8 minutes, from just over 4 minutes a year ago.
• Teenagers and Texts – Teens send and receive a total of 3,339 texts on average, per month.

Yes, I think it is fair to say the texting revolution is upon us. 13- to 17-year-olds are sending over 3,300 texts per month – more than 100 per day. Adults are catching up. (I may have a sick stomach now!) People from ages 45 to 54 sent and received 323 texts a month in the second quarter of 2010, up 75% from a year ago, Nielsen reports.

Behind the texting explosion is a fundamental shift in how we view our mobile devices. That they are phones is increasingly beside the point.

Text messages – also known as SMS (Short Message Service) – take up less bandwidth than phone calls and cost less. But, consider this folks, a text message’s content is so condensed that it routinely fails, even more than email, to convey the writer’s tone and affect. The more we text the greater there is for the opportunity for misunderstanding.

A recent survey of college students regarding the attitude toward texting found – what they like most with their mobile devices – reaching people. What they like least – that other people can reach them!

James Siminoff, an entrepreneur and founder of PhoneTage, brings texters and talkers together with a service that transcribes voice-mail messages into text messages. Mr. Siminoff proclaims, “Voice-mail is an old way of thinking in a digital lifestyle.”