The potential of QR codes is huge, with their ability to blend together online and offline marketing but so many times I’ve got the feeling that during a marketing meeting someone piped up with the comment “QR codes are cool, maybe we could use them for something”, then they are shoehorned into a campaign where they don’t naturally fit. I believe this poor shoehorning method could be part of the reason for many people disliking QR codes.

The major issue behind QR codes is not their functionality, instead it’s the experience they provide after the user has scan the code and that is purely down the marketers. They are meant to provide an extra content that is otherwise unavailable in the format where the QR code is promoted.

The worst case I’ve ever seen of using QR codes in the image to the right, which has become quite a famous QR failure, where the QR code is used to provide the user with a code that they then have to write down and post to a physical address.

Other issues facing QR codes is that their designs are not the most attractive and that many Smartphone users are still unaware of what they are and what they need to do, meaning many QR campaigns still require instructions.

If you’re interested in doing some marketing with QR codes here is a brief best practise guide;

QR Code best practise guide

• Keep the design simple – Although QR codes are unattractive applying colour and other designs to them can reduce the number of scanners that can read it. You want to keep it as open and available to as many people as possible.
• Make it mobile – People scan QR codes from their mobiles, so if you’re linking to a website make sure the website is mobile optimised.
• Provide Value – You want people to engage and scan your code so provide incentives such as special offers or exclusive experiences, such as trailers/videos.
• Make it easy – Be aware of where your QR code is placed. Make it easy for the user to spot and to scan.

We would love to hear your thoughts and opinions on QR codes, so please leave a comment below or tweets us @KMPDigitata

Certain functionality within Foursquare make it possible create special offers for the major of the location or rewards for checking into a chosen location a certain number of times. An example of this is Starbucks, who created a special Foursquare badge (The Baristas Badge) which is unlocked when the user checks in at 5 different Starbucks locations. Although this technique has been popular it is limited to organisations that have many locations that are generally on the high street and main purpose has been to increase foot traffic more and more companies in recent month people have been finding new ways to use Geo-location services.

Foursquare now has a “Partner” program which allows a company to create a profile, which foursquare users can follow, and suggest locations to their followers where they can award special badges and prizes. Badges can be awarded to people who check-in at the required number of locations and contain a message with them informing the receiver of the campaign objective.

Conan O’Brian Foursquare Campaign

One successful campaign has been the Conan O’Brian Big Orange Blimp, where an advertising blimp was given a social media edge by assigning it a Foursquare location and an exclusive badge, called the Conan BlimpSpotter, that is awarded when you follow the Conan O’Brian team on Foursquare and check-in at the blimp.

The Blimp visited a number of areas during its tour up the east coast of America to New York, including many sporting events where people could see the blimp in the sky. If the blimp was in a user’s area then they could check-in and receive the badge and a notification about the launch of the new season of The Conan O’Brian Show on NBC.

In the month that the Blimp travelled around the east coast it had 14,569 check-ins from 9,967 unique people.

Mazda 2 – Win a car with Foursquare

Mazda have launched a campaign to win the biggest prize ever featured on foursquare, a Mazda 2 worth $15,000. A car manufacturer using Foursquare to promote its latest car seemed to be an odd collaboration with the only locations related to cars being showrooms and maybe race tracks. Mazda have taken a different approach and teamed up with the Soul singer Mayer Hawthorn to create a Foursquare campaign that encouraged people to go to Hawthorn’s performances and informed people about the new Mazda 2.

For a chance to win a Mazda 2 Foursquare users need to follow the MazdaUSA profile to find out where they can collect the badges required to be entered into the competition. For this campaign Mazda have design 4 special badges for people to collect, 3 of which they get when they check into different locations where Mayer is performing. The user needs to obtain 2 badges to receive the 4th badge which contains information on how to enter into the final part of the competition. Throughout the process of going to new locations and receiving the badges the user is supplied with information on the Mazda 2 helping to spread the campaign message.

Geolocation provides marketers with an interesting tool where instead of creating a message and positioning it at places where you hope it will be exposed to the target audience, we are able to get the audience to actively seek out our messages because they are attached to something that they consider to be of worth. It will be interesting to see what other companies do with these services in the near future.

The Sun has drawn first blood with the sensational headline “Labour’s lost it”. The online version of this article is juicy enough link-bait to already hit the first page of Google for the search term “labour”.

There it is, at the time of writing, in fifth position (not counting news results). Ouch.

As well as associated articles, dossiers and microsites that can be found on the sun website, they are also using PPC as part of their attack strategy.

The terms labour, labour party and labour conference all bring up one of the following ads linking to the topic dedicated Feeling Blue section of their site.

And they seem to be pre-empting a response by buying up their own name.

It’s not been all one way traffic, though. Labour were pretty quick to respond with their own ad that plays on a pretty emotive anti-sun topic: Hillsborough. I took this screenshot this morning:

The gloves are off.

However, Labour don’t seem to be buying as many or as broad search terms. If they want to compete, they should be buying up all the search terms the Sun is and directly attacking the paper on its own turf. That could require some deep PPC pockets. In fact, as I check now the ad isn’t showing. Has the budget dried up already?

The US presidential election digital campaigns demonstrated the importance of rapid response to on and offline trending topics. In particular the paid search campaigns for both camps had to respond quickly and effectively to online buzz and breaking news. Eric Frenchman, the guy in charge of John McCain’s PPC has blogged about using search for political or news rapid response.

So now it’s the UK’s turn and although I hope the tactics might not get quite as… dubious as in the American election, I think Search and social media will be two areas where the battle will be viciously fought.

Interesting times lie ahead.

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Update: It seems Labour didn’t have anything directly to do with the Hillsborough ads, the Telegraph reports. The ads stopped showing around 2 the afternoon. Either there was a very small budget allocated or they were pulled. Over enthusiastic supporters or plausible deniability? Either way it’s a shame, I’d have liked to see a real scrap!

I’ve found another blog post here on the same topic that discusses the Rules of engagement for political parties.

Cadbury’s Creme Egg Twisted

In order to promote their new chocolate bar – “Twisted”. Cadbury have come up with the C.I.A. (Cadbury Intelligence Agency) in which you can enroll and then solve clues to track down escaped Twisted Bars on a map. They’ve got many of the social media bases covered with Twitter, Facebook and Bebo profiles.

Do you want to become a C.I.A. Agent?

So far nearly 10,000 users are registered on the site, and another 52,500 have become friends or fans on the social network pages. This is a reasonable number of participants but it’s possible that they could have done better. The different elements of the site feel disjointed and there is little opportunity or incentive to participate with other people. The social network pages have not fostered much in the way of discussion or media submissions so the amount of shareable content is mostly limited to that produced by the campaign agency.

Nothing To Hide – Air New Zealand

In order to let people know that they don’t add hidden charges onto their fares, Air New Zealand have created the “Nothing To Hide” campaign. They persuaded members of their staff to appear in promotional videos wearing body-painted uniforms. The videos a very tastefully done and the humor comes from the reactions of people in the airport and on board the plane.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elD38pJX7iE[/youtube]

In terms of interactivity, there is little direct participation between Air New Zealand and the viewers however by creating compelling content and using YouTube as a distribution platform (making the videos easy to share), they have achieved the goal of creating awareness. At the time of writing the four videos have racked up over 3.5 million views between them.

Prizes for Twitter Mentions

Creating brand awareness by giving stuff away is not a new idea, however recently Twitter has been the platform of choice for these campaigns. It’s worth noting that the most successful campaigns are the ones that appeal to typical Twitter users, giving away laptops and mobile phones is likely to be more popular than boxes of cereal or spa days.

SquareSpace

Squarespace (an online website building service) created a campaign in which they decided to give away an iPhone every day for 30 days to a randomly selected Twitter user who had posted an update including the tag “#squarespace”.

Things have not run completely smoothly for Squarespace however. Once it became apparent that Squarespace were giving away $200 Apple gift certificates, which could be use to purchase an iPhone (or any other Apple products), question began to be asked over whether the campaign was being deceptively marketed.

The results were still quite impressive, #squarespace was a regular entry in Twitter’s trending topics for several days and peaked at 0.8% share of all Twitter posts – not bad for a total of $6000 in prizes.

Squarespace's share of Twitter posts

MoonFruit

Following Squarespace’s lead, Moonfruit (another online site building service) created a campaign to celebrate their 10th anniversary by giving away 10 MacBook Pros to Twitter users posting the “#moonfruit” tag. The response has been spectacular even in the face of other events dominating Twitter’s traffic.

A simple call to action with a desirable prize

Just a couple of days into the promotion, the term Moonfruit exceeded 2% of all Twitter posts

Moonfruit's share of Twitter posts

Having learnt from the criticism given to Squarespace, Moonfruit have been very clear in their offering – a MacBook Pro, delivered to your door, wherever you are.

What are the important factors here?

Be creative – Cadbury and Air New Zealand score by coming up with original and entertaining content, prompting people to share it with their friends.

Be relevant – Squarespace and Moonfruit have used peoples desire to own fancy hardware to motivate them into spreading the brandname in a simple case of grabbing as much traffic as possible

In both cases, the measured output is a volume of online mentions, something which is more relevant than ever as real-time search is starting to become a major source of online attention.

However, if you weren’t one of the lucky ones in attendance, How-Do have created a short video of the highlights of the evening, to make sure that no one missed out.

You can view the video below:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHk03HU3Gq4[/youtube]

The How-Do awards are now in their second year, and have already become a prestigious event in the industry calendar.  Last year it was attended by over 570 guests, and this year’s awards looks set to record the same success.

With over 200 entries for the awards, the standard seems to be as high as ever, and reflects the popularity of the How-Do awards.  KMP are proud to be sponsoring the PR Agency award, with KMP’s Chairman, Bill Daring presenting the award to the winner on the night.

This year sees a slightly different format to last, with two guest speakers – Peter Salmon, the BBC’s Director North and Mark Howe, Country Director Google UK.

Good luck to all the nominees!

Managing social media is a vital part of any brand strategy, the nature of the beast is that conversation will take place about your brand whether you like it or not and a failure to participate in these conversations can let misconceptions perpetuate or problems to go unmanaged. At worst this can have an adverse impact on the perception of your brand.

Independent market analyst Datamonitor has revealed how quickly the number of people participating in online social networking is growing: the UK currently leads Europe, in terms of membership, and is expected to reach 27 million users – a threefold increase on today’s figures – by 2012.

According to VNU.net, nearly half of the online adult population around the world is a member of at least one networking site, with Facebook and MySpace between them housing over 170 million monthly active users.

Other social media activity is also continuing to grow at a frenetic pace. According to Wave3 research of active users:

• 394m watch video clips online
• 346m read blogs
• 321m read personal blogs
• 307m visit a friend’s social network page
• 303m share a video clip
• 272m manage a profile on a social network
• 248m upload photos
• 216m download video podcasts
• 215m download podcasts
• 184m start their own blog
• 183m upload a video clip
• 160m subscribe to an RSS feed

These are not insignificant numbers of people and in recent research, 34% of bloggers revealed that they currently post opinions about products and brands on their blog. According to new research, 62% of people are more likely to trust and use online reviews written by fellow shoppers before making a purchase, hence the relative importance of bloggers to a brand is growing.

In general, people want brands to talk with them rather than to them and this shows in the statistic that 36% of online users state that they think more positively about companies who actually run their own blog.

The report is available by dropping Katy Howell an email, see here for details.

See the ad here or click below: Orange – free texts, Facebook and Myspace

Now Vodafone are getting in on the act, promoting Mobile Internet using unlimited Facebook access as the hook.

Is this kind of move the trigger to take social networking truly mobile?

Let’s check out some of the figures:

A significant beginning (US):

• 32% of MySpace users upload content taken on a mobile phone
• 13% Facebook
• 11% Windows Live Spaces

In the UK:

• 21% MySpace
• 18% Windows Live Space
• 9% You Tube
• 9% Bebo

Young: 69% of those users submitting content to social network via mobile are aged 15-17 (US) 9% of UK mobile social networkers are 15-17 compared 5% of the total population

Bebo – a pot of mobile gold? 40% of mobile social networkers (aged 15-17) use Bebo compared to MySpace (28%) and windows Live spaces (27%)(stats courtesy of Telephia)

Don’t worry if you’ve not registered yet – we’re still taking bookings, and you could join the likes of Bentley Motors, Alliance & Leicester, Waterstone’s and Canon to learn all there is to know about Blogging from 3 blogging experts.

Speakers include KMP’s own Client Services Manger, Paul Fabretti, Mark Rogers, CEO of Market Sentinel, and Chris Bland, Senior Account Manager of Greenlight.
This will be the first of 2 seminars on this topic, which takes place next Friday 11th April, at the MDDA in Manchester, with the second seminar taking place on the 25th April in London.

See our seminar programme for more information about this seminar or for details of our future seminars, which include insights into “The Future of PR Technology” and “Marketing 2.0.”

In order to test out the system I decide to use the feeds from our Biotech community Site – Biofind. The result is what you can see below.

This is a good example of the “software-as-a-service” approach to development. We could have spent a huge amount of time and effort in creating a widget platform but it make much more commercial sense to use an existing platform and concentrate on supplying and tracking content.