Scan our barcode linking to Losasso.com

Almost everyone knows what a barcode is – it is used to collect information via a scanner into an internal system that then tracks the price, as well as other information, of a particular item.  Recently, barcodes have began to evolve into a way to quickly and easily share and transfer information about yourself (or whatever you may be scanning) with others, in the form of mobile barcodes, also known as QR codes.

According to Wikipedia, a mobile bar code, or “QR Code is a matrix barcode (or two-dimensional code), readable by QR scanners, mobile phones with camera, and smartphones.  The code consisting of black modules arranged in a square pattern on white background. The information encoded can be text, URL or other data.”

Mobile barcodes are currently being used in advertising campaigns across the globe (they have been using them in China since the mid-90s).  From billboards to print advertisements, QR codes are showing up in a number of traditional advertising mediums.   This concept also has great potential as a networking tool.  Imagine walking into a conference or trade show where each person’s name tag displays a mobile bar code that when scanned links to their virtual business card or company landing page.  Take that a step further and each booth could have a mobile barcode that links to a PDF about their products or more information about their company in general.

Although this is not new technology, it is just beginning to show up in the US as a mainstream form of information exchange.  Mobile barcodes are a very interesting concept, but only time will tell how useful this technology will prove to be in the world of marketing and advertising.

*To download a free mobile barcode reader application, click here.

Apple recently introduced iAd, a software system that puts ads into the applications available at the App Store. Over the years Apple has gained the reputation that its products are pricey, but they are also innovative, cutting edge, and just plain cool – and usually worth the extra money. Will iAd prove the same? No definitive word on that yet, but one thing is clear, the price tag is certainly keeping with the Apple tradition. With ad space reportedly at a whopping $1 million and even more to get in at the launch, an Apple spokeswoman said the company will sell and serve the ads, while app developers will receive 60 percent of the revenue and Apple gets the other 40 percent. Currently, similar mobile deals are costing marketers between $100,000 and $200,000. Essentially, Apple is charging $10 per-thousand impressions (CPM), as well as an additional $2 every time a user clicks through the ad (CPC) – most mobile ad systems generally charge for one or the other, but Apple has taken it to a whole new level by charging for both.

Furthermore, even though companies are paying big bucks for the space, they will be forced to hand over creative control to Apple (at least for the time-being). According to the Wall Street Journal, “The ads will go through an approval process, and Apple will build the ads itself during the first couple of months to make sure they work well and attain a certain aesthetic and functionality. Eventually, Apple plans to create a developer kit so that agencies will be able to design and create the ads themselves.”

While it is understandable that Apple wants to make sure everything is perfect, not everyone is totally comfortable with the arrangement, “…as a creative director, I don’t feel completely comfortable letting Apple do the creative,” says Lars Bastholm, chief digital creative officer at WPP’s Ogilvy. Aside from questions about the cost and creative control of iAd, marketers are excited about the new outlet. Advertisers will be able to reach a very large audience (According to Apple, it has sold 85 million iPhones and iPod Touches so far and says consumers spend approximately 30 minutes using applications per day) and will be able to target users based on things like download preferences and general location.

IAd is expected to launch on the iPhone and iPod Touch in June and on the iPad later in the year.

Why are corporations having such a hard time breaking into the social media scene?  Ask any CEO or other top executive of a corporation if they want to be bombarded with advertisements every time they check their phones or log on to their computers – I can guarantee you the answer would be a resounding “No!”  Yet they fill their Facebook pages and Twitter feeds with pushy advertising and in-your-face self-promotion anyway and wonder why they can’t get on the social media radar.

So how can corporations use social media to their advantage while at the same time gaining friends or followers for their pages?  The answer is simple and goes back to the root of what people look for in a friendship – a mutually beneficial relationship.  Corporations need to make users feel like they are valued and that their opinions are what matter, not just the money they may potentially spend.  Users want to see information that is interesting and will benefit them, not just involving the company’s product, but also things like what’s going on in the industry and ways users can interact with the company and with other users in the online community.  If companies want advertising all they have to do is give users content they will want to share – not many people will want to send a blatant advertisement to their friends, but an interesting article posted on the company blog or Facebook page is something that users will pass along.

The bottom line here:  Let pushy ads and self-promotion fall to the way-side and give users what they really want – interesting content they can learn something from and pass along to others.  That kind of customer-promoted publicity can’t be bought and will be much more valuable than any form of self-promotion could ever be.

Domino’s Pizza puts negative customer commentary front and center in its new “Pizza Turnaround” marketing campaign. The TV commercials feature clips of focus group participant commentary on the pizza’s quality: “bland,” “boring,” “bad,” “the worst imitation of wheat crust,” and the list goes on. The CEO of Domino’s and a variety of Domino’s “employees” address the harsh feedback, turning the product’s negative perception into a challenge, and The Pizza Turnaround campaign is born. It’s an honest and bold marketing approach that may just help the 50-year-old brand defend its status as leading pizza delivery company in the U.S.

Pizza Turnaround promises customers an improved dining and delivery experience, with a reinvented sauce recipe, better dough quality, and fresher ingredients. It also promise a full refund if you’re not satisfied. Add that to the $5.99 promotional price for 2 medium, 2-topping pizzas, and Domino’s makes it easier to give the product a second chance. The TV commercial spot contains some hokey lines like, “We’ve put 40% more herbs and seasoning in our sauce,” but overall, Pizza Turnaround was an intrepid step.

The campaign is fully integrated into the brand’s Facebook page and Twitter account, and the Pizza Turnaround landing page features the full-length campaign documentary. Video links to Stephen Colbert Report’s “rip” on the campaign and #newpizza Twitter trending topic (he named Domino’s his Alpha Dog of the Week) and to the CBS Morning Show “Pizza for Breakfast” review.

Domino’s encourages customers to engage in the conversation, and the feedback ranges from cheers: “Tried the new Domino’s Pizza yesterday…Remarkable Improvement” to jeers: “We tried the new pizza last night. Grade: C-.” The company plays an active role in the social media campaign by engaging in the negative and positive commentary. Whether or not the product is truly improved is a matter of personal preference, but Pizza Turnaround succeeded in placing the company into the social media stratosphere.

Chain Reaction

As a social media marketer, the recent spat between behemoth HP and struggling Kodak underscores how a small player can leverage this space to draw attention and possibly even draw larger competitors into a place that benefits the little guy.

Basically, HP is claiming that Kodak cannot stand behind its marketing claims – this complaint doesn’t draw a lot of ire from consumers, we are well-trained skeptics. Other than the iPod and The Clapper – there are precious few technology products that are truly as advertised.

So now the two companies are trading swipes on Twitter and getting covered on the newswire and the head of HPs social media effort is being quoted with comments such as “You have a fight you can’t possibly win. I am HP.”

The irony of all of this is that this from is the head of social media strategy for HP. This is sure to draw a lot of social media coverage, but not the kind she wants. In a fight like this, the underdog holds the advantage in public perception. To me it looks like Goliath has taken David’s bait and leaned down with one eye open.

On the marketing front this seems to have gone badly as well, it appears that the two have allowed things to spin into a price war. HP can surely weather this more easily than Kodak, but in the long run, it is not good news for either.

It is hard to know what sort of ill will sticks to a brand when it behaves like this, but one thing is for certain, it is better to stand up for your brand and speak proudly of what you do well. If you have to address a competitor directly, do it with challenges that play to your strengths and attack their weaknesses with benefits, not insults – you just look like a bitter, old bully – and bullies don’t do well in the social space.

More and more brands are jumping onto social media sites without asking themselves one simple question: Why? Most have walked blindly into the social media arena because it’s free or because everyone else is doing it, without an actual social media strategy. Many have failed to realize that having accounts on Twitter, Facebook or MySpace, posting videos on YouTube, or creating a blog does not mean that you have a social media strategy. All of these efforts are merely marketing tactics and are not effective in engaging customers when not backed by a cohesive plan.  A social media strategy needs to be drafted in order to connect all of your online efforts to an overall purpose.

Search Engine Watch recently posted an article that takes a close look at the difference between marketing tactics and social media strategy.  If you have jumped on the social media bandwagon without creating a solid social media strategy, take some time to consider these important points:

Answering the “Why?”: Why are you using this particular social media tactic? It is important to choose the tools that will work best to implement your strategy. You should be focused on ways to authentically connect to followers and making sure every tactic has a purpose. Start by going to sites where your audience is already interacting.

How to Deploy: Are you going to utilize social media as a place to ask your audience questions, offer advice or keep followers up to date on what is going on with your brand? All too often brands use social media tactics as a way to throw information about their brand at their audience.  Instead, they should be asking themselves how to best engage their target audience.

Defining Your Goals and Measuring: How do you know that your social media strategy is successful? Establish a method for measuring ROI for your social media efforts. There is no universal way to measure a brand’s success in social media, so create a method that is right for your brand. A good place to begin is by benchmarking against competitors. You can also compare your traffic at different stages of the social media campaign. Remember, social media success is not about how many Facebook fans or Twitter followers you have- it’s about engaging your audience and facilitating conversation!

When to Re-evaluate: Although most companies forget to, it is crucial to set points in your strategy for re-evaluation.  This makes it easier to fix something that isn’t working well or better yet, take advantage of something that is working really well.  Here at LoSasso, we launched Brunswick Bowling’s presence in social media with its Win a Wii-a-Day Sweepstakes. Due to the high level of interaction on Facebook and Twitter, our interactive division created a YouTube video contest on the fly. By re-evaluating our efforts during the campaign, we were able to leverage the excitement being generated around the sweepstakes and generate even more social interaction.

Creating a robust web presence is important now more than ever. A website with top of the line graphics, enough flash to slow even a 15mbps download speed, won’t do you much good if you can’t target clients and increase qualified traffic.

So how do you do this? Create a client-serving site rather than a self-serving site

Start by developing relevant content. Providing value through your content will keep users on your site and show them your worth to their business. Research and get inside your potential client’s thought process.

What are they looking for? How can you solve their problems better than your competition?

Too often, companies focus on what they can do rather than what they can do for potential clients. There is a subtle but important distinction between these statements, and clients can tell the difference.

Next, make your site less complex. Focus on site functionality rather than flashy, complicated set-ups that look cool superficially, but ultimately distract viewers from their purpose. A site that is easy to navigate will result in more page views and more conversions than their flashy counterparts.

Finally, connect with potential clients in the environments they already frequent – like social media sites. The website is no longer the center of the internet universe. It is merely a part of a larger – more fluid – structure where social media sites and search engines connect users to valuable content.

Use this to your advantage by bringing potential clients to your site through social networks. One way to do this is by using social media sites to distribute your site’s content. Create daily blog posts and use Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc. to deliver traffic to your site.

Be sure to deliver valuable content and not a transparent sales pitch. Again, clients can see the difference. If the content you create is valuable and targeted to potential clients they will view more pages and – hopefully- invest in your services or buy your products.

Are your blog, Twitter feed and e-mail newsletters full of “important,” “relevant,” and “compelling” facts about why your products and services are better than your competitors? Do you make a great case? Lay out all the facts? Drive home the important messages?

You could be chasing away the people you are hoping to engage.

Like the creep at the cocktail party that can’t stop talking about himself, companies that have little to offer beyond traditional “Me, Me, Me” marketing messages are finding little audience and even less engagement in the realm of social media.

These days marketers are all abuzz about social media. They want to find ways to better utilize social media to “harness the groundswell” and “go viral.” The problem is most don’t deliver content that anyone would want to read, much less forward to a friend.

The truth is, most people don’t care that much about your products or your company. And why should they? People go online for information and entertainment – not a sales pitch. If you want to attract and engage their attention, provide content that will trigger their “a-ha” reflex, relieve a pain point or provide some form of entertainment.

In a recent post on CopyBlogger, Sonia Simone discusses how boring, self-serving content has “killed” e-mail marketing:

Self-centered content is dull… I get dozens of messages every day that are so boring and self-centered I can’t be bothered to unsubscribe. I just set up a rule to automatically throw them in the trash as they come in. Or I let them pile up in the spam filter until I feel like deleting 20 or 30 at a time without looking at them.”

Any marketer will tell you they understand the need to provide valuable information online. But what constitutes value? Unless someone is actively researching a purchase, a list of specifications isn’t going to hold much value. Besides, that information is already available on your website.

To be effective in social media, you’ve got to stop selling and simply provide information that offers independent value. Industry trends, interesting anecdotes, helpful tips, links to important content from other sources – anything that your target audience will be excited to read.

Providing content that is relevant but not a direct sales pitch, builds credibility and authority for your business. It creates trust and ongoing engagement. People want your content. They’ll wait for it, open it, read it and forward it on to others.

If you establish and nurture this type of relationship, then when they are ready to make a purchase, they know and trust you, putting you high on their list of potential solutions.

CTIA Wireless—The Wireless Association recently released the Semi-Annual Wireless Industry Survey Results that may have significant implications for the mobile marketing industry.

The survey results indicate that more than 246 million data-capable devices are in use by consumers and more than 40 million of these devices are Smartphones or wireless-enabled PDAs.

PDAs and Smartphones function like a computer in your pocket, so there are endless opportunities for display and search ads. This provides a huge opportunity for marketers because mobile marketing is still largely untapped by the general marketing industry.

The possibilities don’t end there, SMS marketing is sure to be a growing facet of the industry in coming years as well. During the first half of 2009, 740 billion text messages were sent on carriers’ networks—this breaks down to roughly 4.1 billion messages per day.

A growing segment of the population is communicating via text message, and it’s a way for marketers to provide targeted messages directly to consumers without the noise that can be found in over-crowded email inboxes.

As of June 2009, the industry survey recorded more than 276 million wireless users, which represents a year-over-year increase of nearly 14 million subscribers. We are not seeing this type of growth in any other segment of the American or Global industry.

While mobile marketing is still in its infancy, it presents a huge opportunity for marketers. Those that jump on the mobile bandwagon first will not only gain vital experience, but also valuable market share. With the recession shifting marketing spend from traditional to interactive platforms, I think mobile marketing has a fair shot at absorbing some of the shift.

As more and more people are accessing the internet on their mobile phones, marketers are struggling to keep up with the changing landscape of internet usage.

As of May 2008, Nielson reported that mobile internet had over 40 million active users with many sites attracting millions of unique users. This data indicates that mobile internet usage has reached a critical mass as an advertising medium in the US.

That being said, one of the key questions on marketers’ minds is: How can we best optimize our brand for mobile customers?

DMNews recently ran an article that offered five tips for marketers. These tips lay out how to develop a strong brand presence on the mobile web.

Integrate Microsoft Tag into Print Advertising: In January of this year, Microsoft introduced Tag to the United States. Tag allows users to instantly connect to more information and entertainment without having to type out long URLs. Mobile users can simply snap the Tag with their phone, and Microsoft Tag will connect them to their destination. Mobile barcodes such as these are ground-breaking because they require no typing on small keyboards and make mobile content easily accessible. It’s a great way for brands to link online mobile content to offline advertising.

Don’t Clone Your Desktop Site: It’s important for marketers to realize that mobile and desktop internet usage is different. Simply applying the same SEO techniques to both platforms will not necessarily be effective. Mobile searchers are not always searching the same keywords as desktop users, so marketers should conduct mobile-specific keyword research using tools like Google’s mobile keyword tool. This will help brands to specifically tailor their approach to mobile users.

Follow Mobile-Specific Signals: As search engines continue to develop more accurate mobile search ranking algorithms, they are likely to search for signals that indicate a query is generated mobile-ly. A good way for brands to stand out in mobile search engines is to include the word “mobile” in your mobile title tags. Specialized title tags acts as a great indicator that content is mobile-specific.

Create Mobile Content: Mobile content creation is key to creating a mobile brand presence. Here are some ways to increase visibility:
a. Make sure the desktop site is Mobile OK compliant
b. Create a unique site geared toward mobile users and host it on a new TLD or subdomain
c. Develop an app for mobile users
d. Optimize feed-based content listings like RSS and video
e. Actively participate on social media outlets that have mobile interfaces

Make ‘Em Laugh: The largest category of mobile usage is entertainment. From waiting in line at the bank to sitting at the bus stop, mobile users are often looking to be entertained. Brands that do that will be successful.