Marketing
QR Code Adoption
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 04/07/2011 - 21:14Lee Odden over at ToPrankBlog put up a blog post today, Will QR Codes Gain Mass Adoption?.
His post ends,
as creative and interesting QR codes are, I’m a bit skeptical in terms of mass adoption. For some reason, I can’t imagine consumer behavior changing to start scanning codes for things when they could just search or enter a URL. There’s also the technology that needs to be adopted by more devices.
Granted, I was a bit skeptical of Foursquare and Twitter too, but also Google Wave and Second Life.
What do you think?
My regular readers will recall that I've talked a lot about QR codes, as well as Google Wave and Second Life. So, I wrote a fairly long comment, that stands pretty well as a blog post of its own:
I am an innovator/early adopter in the technology adoption lifecycle, so I've always been a fan of new sites and new technology, whether it be Foursquare, Twitter, or Second Life and Google Wave, so it should come as no surprise that I'm QR Code believer.
First, however, let me offer a brief digression about Second Life and Google Wave. I don't believe either of those ideas failed. What failed was the companies efforts to promote it. I've spent a lot of time in Second Life and alway felt it was seriously mismanaged. I started talking a lot back then about the importance of open source virtual worlds, and just as we see Second Life dwindling, we are seeing more and more interest in OpenSim, an open source version of Second Life servers. While I have less for criticisms of Google, I find it interesting that while Google has stopped promoting Google Wave, they handed to code over to Apache, and there folks working on various open source Apache Wave servers. (I've run both OpenSim and Apache Wave servers).
Okay. Back to QR Codes. People need a reason to scan a barcode, whether it is a one dimensional or two dimensional bar code. In supermarkets, where UPC codes have been around for a many years, and during the early years, were rarely scanned, it is only in recent years we have gotten to the point of consumers scanning bar codes as they check out. They get something in return, a shorter wait in the checkout line. (At least in theory).
If people will scan UPC codes for some value, they will scan QR codes if value is presented to them. I've seen small specialized cases where that value exists: Scanning a QR Code at a museum to get information about a painting. More information for those who scan QR codes. I've heard stories of people scanning QR Codes in Japan to request taxis pick them up at a taxi stand. Better service for those who scan QR codes. I've heard stories of QR codes on Real Estate ads as a more efficient way of asking for information about a house for sale, but I haven't seen that and don't have details. That said, the QR Codes that I've scanned in magazine articles have not provided me any benefit.
So, will QR Codes make it? Yeah, when some creative people find ways of using them to provide value to customers that they can also profit off of, and I'm sure there are some creative people out there that can pull it off.
A Reflection on the Super Bowl Ads
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 02/07/2011 - 21:31Sunday night, I stayed up to watch some of the Super Bowl. I got tired sometime after half time and went to bed without staying up for the end of the game. It was a good game, even for those of us somewhat ambivalent about football.
As always, the part that was most interesting to me was the ads. Looking back, what do I remember? Cowboys and Aliens. I think that was a serious ad for a movie coming out, but it was bizarre enough that I wasn’t sure. There was also Thor and Captain America ads, but I don’t remember anything about them. Not that it matters, I am very unlikely to see either movie.
There were the typical ads. Etrade had yet another iteration of the baby talking about trading. Cute. GoDaddy had another ad exploitating of women. Annoying. Coke had some good ads equating Coke with happiness, or something like that. One car company appeared to be trying to evoke a reference to a famous VW ad. Didn’t really work. Another car company had something about aliens wanting to capture the car. Didn’t really work either.
The ad I found most interesting was for the new Motorola tablet. It was a great twist on the famous 1984 ad by Apple. Yet in this ad, the mindless drones were dressed in ways that evoked Apples images, including the classic iPod headphones. My wife didn’t get the references, so it may not have been effective with the general population, but from my geek/media/marketing perspective, I thought it was brilliant.
Oh, and Doritos had a funny ad too. At least I think it was about Doritos as an elixir bringing things back to life.
So, without looking at any of the ads, what do you remember?
Managing Personal and Corporate Brands Online
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 01/22/2011 - 15:17When I first started establishing my identity on the Internet, nearly thirty years ago, managing personal and corporate brands wasn’t an issue. The only people on the Internet were from universities and research institutions. There was supposed to be no personal or corporate use of the Internet. My identification was my initials and the host machine I was using, which was a weird amalgam of the location, operating system and on information about the machine.
Things have changed a bit in the past thirty years, and I’ve been thinking a bit about this as I read reports about Keith Olbermann leaving MSNBC and Geoff Fox leaving WTNH. Both of these people have very well developed personal brands, probably more developed as a result of their on air personalities as opposed to their online personalities, but the online persona plays an important part. Online communities have sprung up criticizing MSNBC and WTNH for letting go of these popular personalities.
Most of my work is online. Some people have faces made for radio. Others have voices made for writing online. I have focused on my online personal brand. ahynes1, Aldon Hynes, and Orient Lodge are the three primary aspects of my brand, and I try to tie all of them together, as much as possible using similar avatars, color schemes, and anything else that can make my personal brand consistent.
Now that I’ve taken a position with Community Health Center, Inc. in Connecticut, I need to manage both my personal brand, and what my contributions or to CHC’s brand. What I write here on Orient Lodge is promoting my personal brand. It is expressing my own opinions. What I write on the CHC Facebook page, is intended to promote the organization’s brand.
Different organizations have different relationships between the personal brands of employees and the brand of the organization. For media where an individual’s personality is important, the individuals brand get a lot of focus. For consumer goods, there is less likely to be a personal brand associated, unless there is some sort of celebrity endorsement. For realtor’s the individual’s brand is often more important than the agency they are working for.
The medical field seems a bit more complicated, in that both the brands of the providers and the brands of the organizations are important.
So, as I work on establishing the best relationships between personal brands and corporate brands where I work, I would encourage all my readers to think about their personal brands, the brands of the organizations they work at, and how they relate.
Playing with Email Marketing
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 12/18/2010 - 11:34Back in August, I wrote a blog piece about Playing with Google Friend Connect Newsletters and other stuff. It turns out that if you have Google Friend Connect set up on your blog, you can use it to send newsletters to people who have opted in. At the time, there were 49 people that had opted-in and I sent them an email.
I haven’t sent another email blast using Google Friend Connect since then. Email blasts just really aren’t a high priority for my blog. Since then, the number of newsletter subscribers has grown to 80 out of the 289 people that have joined Orient Lodge on Google Friend Connect. I’ll probably send them an email about this blog post and random other updates.
At my new job, we’ve been talking about improving our email marketing, so I’ve been spending a bit of time looking at different email marketing systems. I’ve asked a bunch of friends, done a bit of testing and have some initial thoughts and a further request.
The email marketing system that has the greatest mindshare is Constant Contact. If you ask people about email marketing systems, just about everyone will mention them. They are very good. People also mention that they are the strictest. If you want to do anything more than very straight forward opt-in email marketing, they are probably not the folks to use.
The other email marketing system that got a lot of comments was Vertical Response. The comments I received were unanimous. Avoid them. Most of the complaints were about usability. It is just too hard a system to work with.
GetResponse got some good reviews, but I haven’t really spent time exploring them. There was one other system that was recommended called Emma. However, they seemed awfully pricy and I decided not to use them.
The two systems that got the best response and seemed to fit best with what I’m looking at are MailChimp and Mad Mimi. Mad Mimi seems to be better oriented towards building up new lists. They are pretty straight forward about who you can contact:
To add audience, each person must either:
Be a customer, member or subscriber of your organization.
Have asked to get your emails by signing up in some way.
Have bought something from you in the past 18 months.
MailChimp says
No 3rd party lists, no prospects, no lists that you scraped from websites, no chambers of commerce lists, etc
The two statements are perhaps not all that different, other than the tone, but for someone interested in building their lists, they should look at these policies to see which system feel more comfortable.
One other system I started looking at was CoreMotives running as part of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. There are some really interesting aspects of embedding an email marketing system within a CRM, but it probably doesn’t work well for smaller bloggers.
In terms of ease of use, I found Mailchimp pretty nice in terms of constructing nice emails. On a first pass, Mad Mimi doesn’t seem as strong in this area. I also like Mailchimp’s SocialPro. It pulls data from different sites, including Rapleaf and Gravatar so that you can better segment your lists. SocialPro is free until March, but still needs some work. They have some other nice integration with social media, Google Analytics and other tools for tracking and interacting with the system.
Mad Mimi does some really nice social media integration, and may be easier for some sorts of email blasts once you get everything configured just right. I’m told they have some other interesting features that are worth exploring.
Both Mad Mimi and Mailchimp put up the emails as webpages and you can see my first attempts here and here.
So, that’s where I’m at right now with testing these systems. I’ve added sections in the lower left hand part of my blog where you can subscribe via MailChimp and Mad Mimi. If you’re interested in participating in my testing, please consider signing up. Also, if you use any email marketing system to promote your blog, share your thoughts.
The Buckyballs Contest
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 11/23/2010 - 14:24I don’t normally do promotions, contests, paid content or stuff like that, but recently I’ve received a few emails from the folks promoting Buckyballs and they are exactly the sort of product that I would be interested in promoting.
So, here’s the deal. Promote my online presence, my blog, my twitter account, this blog post, stuff like that, and tell me about it in the comments. The more you promote, the more chances you have to win. I will select three winners who will receive their own Buckyballs. Winners will need to provide me with a mailing address in the United States where the Buckyballs can be shipped. For more details, check below the fold.
