Twenty Uses for QR Codes & Tags for Marketing
Tags: business, marketing, QR Codes
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‘Uncategorized’ Articles
Mobile Marketing Gets to the Point
The next time you are standing at a bus stop, or you are waiting for a train, take a look around at anything that interests you and take a photograph of it with the camera on your internet enabled phone. For instance, that poster advertising a film that you have heard good reviews about, or perhaps the advertisement for a chocolate bar. Chances are that you will just have photograph of an advertisement on your phone and a pretty shaky one at that unless you are a professional photograph specialising in photos taken through phones.
But wouldn’t it be useful if that photograph led to you finding out where you could see that film in the cinema nearest to you, at what time and buy tickets for it then and there? Or by photographing the chocolate bar on the poster you received a digital voucher which you could redeem in your local corner shop on one of those chocolate bars? Another useful application of your mobile phone could be when you are driving around an area looking for houses you might be interested in buying.
Currently, you have to get the details from an estate agent or an online service about houses and then plan a tour around the area to see which ones you want to view. But, if you see a house on your tour for which you had not printed off the details you would have to mess about calling the agent or logging onto the web to get the details. It’s frustrating and the speed at which you find details on the internet at home or at work makes it all the more so because you cannot find them so quickly when you are away from the web. It would very useful if you could take a snap of the outside of the house on your phone and see details about it immediately to see whether it is in your budget.
Well, this capability is now available through your Nokia mobile via their ‘Point and Find’ service. It allows you to find information like this now. All you need is the ‘Point and Find’ software on your internet enabled phone to get instant information. The service is quick and easy to use. For marketers, it gets around a major hurdle with mobile marketing which is the fact that people don’t like having to tap out more than basic messages on their phones. The three keys activities carried out on mobiles are search, social networking and photography. But search is limited by people’s reluctance to type on their keypads so Google is developing a voice driven mobile version of their search engine.
With services like ‘Point and Find‘ or ‘Amazon Remembers‘ you just need to photograph what you are interested in to get the information you want about the product or service you have seen. The possibilities are endless. And they both meet the ‘Want It Now!’ feeling that we all experience now. Consumers hate having to wait.
Marketers will be able to understand which of their off-line marketing collateral is most effective and which locations are most productive. Marketing investment can be targeted more effectively and efficiently. Mobile marketing will become more mainstream with the reality of instant gratification as the database of products and services are increased in these services.
Tags: amazon, BBC, business, digital, google, internet, marketing, media, mobile, networking, Nokia, photography, Point & Find, print, radio
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Will talking about eBay Desktop and QR Codes on BBC Radio Lincolnshire
Here is a recent recording of Will on William Wright’s BBC Radio Lincolnshire drive time ‘techie’ slot talking rich internet applications and the QR codes.
Download now or listen on posterous
Download now or listen on posterous
Will speaking on BBC Radio – Rich Internet Application.mp3 (14658 KB)
Tags: BBC, business, internet, QR Codes, radio, William Wright
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Will talking about eBooks on BBC Radio Lincolnshire
Here is a recent recording from when Will was invited by BBC Radio Lincolnshire’s William Wright to talk about eBooks and the market for them on his drive time ‘techie’ section.
Tags: BBC, books, business, ebooks, radio, William Wright
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Google Analytics on your desktop
Image via Wikipedia
If you have not heard of Adobe AIR before then it may not be a surprise. However, if you are a marketer and you have not heard of Google Analytics then I would be flabbergasted.
Tracking your visitors and web traffic through the use of Google Analytics is an essential activity for most web marketers these days. This data is one stream of many pieces of information being fed to you all day and everyday as part of your job. It’s a tsunami of information which needs to be tamed and used effectively.
This is where Adobe’s AIR comes in nicely. You don’t really need to know much about AIR if you are not a developer. You just install it for free on your PC or MAC and forget about it.
Then you can download a free tool from the Adobe web site called ‘Google Analytics Reporting Suite’ which sits on your desktop and provides a very nice way to analyse your Google Analytics 
information in a much more user-friendly way than from the web site.
In the jargon, this is called a ‘Rich Internet Application’ which is software which allows you much more control over how the information that is important to you gets displayed. It’s good and you will see a lot more of these sort of tools which take information from the web and present it to you in a much better way than previously possible.
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Tags: adobe, Adobe AIR, blogs, change, content, developer, google, internet, media, VW
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Star Wars Mouse
I saw this on Microsoft’s homepage and it took me a while to understand what it was. It’s their new mouse and it looks great.
It’s as though it has come out of the Apple design studios it’s so different. It’s about time we had some different looking hardware and this mouse is great.
Compared to these old fashioned looking things which 
we are all used to.
Image by williamli1983 via Flickr
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Tags: apple, content, design, google, microsoft, technology
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Overspending on web development for small businesses
Some years back, I set up and launched an online delicatessen which sold the produce of small farmers and producers. There was a demand locally and nationally, and it was differentiated from other delicatessens.
I hired a web design company to set up a super web site which had e-commerce capabilities. But, I had no money left to market it effectively and it broke the business.
The lessons were that I should have spent far less on the web site, more time building my business at small markets to begin with, more time writing a blog about food and producers which pointed to my web site and developed my business more cheaply using suitable web methods.
If I had done this, then I would have enabled the business to survive and kept vital cash in the business while still promoting it through my blog and web site.
There was no Twitter at that time and Facebook was barely off the ground. Google Adwords did work and brought me some nice leads, but even then, it cost more money than I had left to market it correctly with the lack of money to do it.
Web sites are important for small businesses but you must keep your scale and your ambitions in check and invest in your web site in line with your clear marketing strategy and budget.
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Tags: assets, business, design, Five, google, marketing, media, small business, Social Media, strategy, Twitter, web design, web sites
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Surveys just waste our time
I had to laugh this morning watching the BBC’s breakfast TV show this morning while eating a slice of toast. One news item talked about a new survey which was revealing which fast food retail outlets were the worst offenders for causing litter in the UK.
Why on earth do you need a survey to tell you that? You just have to look at which are the most numerous fast food outlets in your local town or any town you pass through on your travels to make a pretty well informed guess at which those fast food outlet offenders are likely to be.
Of course, it is not the fast food outlets causing the littering. They merely provide the materials for people with less than adequate socials skills to make their statement about not caring about their environments.
It appears that the BBC is littering the airwaves with these nonsensical surveys which just waste our time and don’t reveal anything that we don’t know already.
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Tags: BBC, media, retail, skills, travel, TV, wave
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Will LinkedIn and Twitter kill telemarketing?
I have recently joined a great small business which develops digital 
solutions for its clients and produces very high quality work. I have been hired to develop new business so that they can continue to grow their profits and expand their capabilities.
The small sales team is very good and highly committed. In the past, to generate new leads and appointments they hired the services of a telemarketing company. They pay them £400 per appointment made as long as it is qualified to their requirements.
Fair enough, you may think, for them to pay the telemarketing company that sort of money for making them appointments according to their brief. But, if they make five appointments for them a week the bill soon mounts up (£2,000 a week if your maths is a bit tired!).
I have been encouraging them to use LinkedIn and it was easy to see that using this tool will be far more effective for the sales team to find new clients than paying a telemarketing company.
Using LinkedIn, I found a prospect in the group of one of their existing key clients. We asked their current contact if he knew the person in question and he replied in the positive. We now have an appointment with contact found on LinkedIn and it cost us nothing bar a couple of phone calls and an email, saving us £400.
So, my question is simple. Will LinkedIn, and other tools such as Twitter, kill telemarketing companies when it is far easier and cheaper to find key prospects using these tools?
Image via Wikipedia
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Tags: business, digital, Five, internet, LinkedIn, marketing, media, networking, sales, small business, Twitter
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Selling like they’re your friends
This is a great article about selling to customers as though they are your friends.
http://trustedadvisor.com/cgreen.articles/37/Friends–Motives-and-Profits–Avoid-Fear-based-Selling
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