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it is important to drill down to where you have a presence, what you do on there are why rather than rashly signing up to every site going and leaving them lacklustre.  Taking a step back to research and consider where your customers are hanging out online and and what strategy you can employ to reach them is essential.

GREEN - the one where your customers hang out most, and makes most sense to your marketing strategy.  Green = Go! This is the site you should start with. Commit some time to updating it regularly, and read around how other businesses are using this channel for marketing. AMBER - these are the social media tools that could add value to your marketing, but should be considered as your business progresses and you find you have some extra time to commit. RED - Avoid these at start-up stage. These may be sites you could justify to yourself using as marketing tools, but they are not an immediate priority. Ditch them for now and put them in your business plan under 'growth strategy'.

Finding Content at Your Fingertips - Google Alerts is absolutely your best friend for narrowing down hours of thinking through "what on earth can I post about".

As more and more Americans turn to their mobile phones for information, the potential for QR codes grows ever larger. (Smart phone proliferation surged above 50% in early 2012). So, rather than wait for QR codes to die or, conversely, assume they’ll be just fine, marketers should take proactive steps to use QR codes more effectively right now.

First, businesses need to have offers that are QR code-specific.

Second, there is a difference between using QR codes in unique ways to get noticed, and using QR codes in unique ways just to be weird.

-- "Mobile Commerce Sales" increased up to 684% with the average being 204%

-- "Store Locator Visits" increased as much as 2,042% with the average being 1,506%

-- "Average Order Value" was as high as $228 with the average being $102

Make it easy to share.

Don't assume your name for something should remain its name.

Keep an eye on trends.

Some 5 percent of Americans — and 15 percent of smartphone owners — have scanned such a code in the last three months, according to new figures due to be released on Monday by Forrester. A year ago, only 1 percent of Americans had been willing or able to do so.

codes provide an efficient and cheap means to link the online and offline worlds.

Digimarc, are pushing methods for embedding the codes into the page so that they don’t disturb the visual layout. The challenge, though, is that it is harder for readers to know that there is more content available.

It posts regular usage updates, and its latest shows QR code scanning in Q2 was up by 39 per cent on Q1, with 1D barcode scanning up 41 per cent.

Be Prepared

Respond in a Timely Manner

Handle Public Grievances Privately

The smartphone shopping share rose from 13.3 percent in Q1, to 15.1 percent in Q2.

During the same time period, sales made through social media dropped to 1.9 percent, from having been 2.4 percent. The mobile marketing numbers from the Online Retail Sales Index from IBM showed that the overall positive feeling regarding social media fell to 18.6 percent from 25.1 percent.

Mark Donovan, senior vice president of mobile and senior analyst with comScore, believes that the popularity of QR codes is ramping up because of the increasing popularity of smartphones. “I think that we’re seeing things like QR codes just start to reach critical mass,” said Donovan. “Today, one in three people in the U.S. owns a smartphone. It’s a good and fairly ubiquitous way to reach those people and there’s still some novelty to it, which can be interesting to consumers.”

The main benefit of QR codes is that they make it easy to direct the consumer wherever you want to lead them. Anything businesses can do to engage potential customers will enhance the “stickiness” of that company in a person’s mind. With enough compelling engagement on your part, potential customers just may become lifelong customers.

Because there are various types of phones, with various types of communications technologies on them, there are also many types of mobile marketing: SMS MMS Mobile Web Apps Bluetooth Location-Based QR Codes Banner Ads Mobile Websites

Mobile Website is an optimized website for viewing on a mobile phone.  Since smart phone screens are generally around three inches wide by four inches tall (or thereabouts), viewing a regular website often displays the text and images too small to read. By optimizing websites for mobile devices, your company can deliver a better web experience for the small screen user, thus increasing the chances that user might interact with the site the way you want them to.

A perfect example of a well-done mobile website is that of pizza maker Papa John’s. Pick up a smart phone and browse to papajohns.com. (It won’t work in a web browser, you’ll have to see it on your phone.) The site is designed so the on-the-go visitor has just a couple of options and can quickly do the most likely thing a mobile user will want to do on papajohns.com: Order a pizza.

By 2013, mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide. According to Gartner's PC installed base forecast, the total number of PCs in use will reach 1.78 billion units in 2013. By 2013, the combined installed base of smartphones and browser-equipped enhanced phones will exceed 1.82 billion units and will be greater than the installed base for PCs thereafter.

Mobile Web users are typically prepared to make fewer clicks on a website than users accessing sites from a PC. Although a growing number of websites and Web-based applications offer support for small-form-factor mobile devices, many still do not. Websites not optimized for the smaller-screen formats will become a market barrier for their owners — much content and many sites will need to be reformatted/rebuilt.

Mobile adoption is skyrocketing, as is the diversity of mobile devices on the market – smartphones and tablets are currently leading multi-screen customer experiences. Today’s multi-device environment is bolstering mindshare and profile for responsive design because it offers a compelling promise to both website visitors and to those who build the Web: a single website that works on all devices.

Of course, there is a lot more to this and the mix and meeting point of resizing of images, while also ensuring they keep an air of quality can take plenty of skill. Aside from images and resizing there are other considerations at hand. To jump to the point; sometimes you don’t need to fit all the information from the big screen onto the small screen – the essentials are what matter. Responsive design cuts out all the needless stuff and gives people a web version of the site that is easy to navigate, without them having to zoom in and also provides them with what they want to see. It eliminates the noise and makes the whole mobile browsing experience a pleasure.

"Hence, we expect around 3-5 years for these glasses to be widely accepted and be priced according to the market affordability."

ScanLife is calling this new offering a Designer Code mobile barcode service.

It claims this, “allows those creating 2D codes, like QR codes, the ability to select from a number of different colour schemes and include images like a brand logo within the code’s design.”

64 percent of American consumers can remember seeing television ads that included social media and QR code symbols such as those for “likes” on Facebook.

33 percent of consumers in the United States have gone on to interact with the social media that was shown on television after having seen it.

This survey included 1,000 respondents. Most of those participants said that they had noticed the use of social media on television and were aware of the ways in which they could interact with those various social networks, including the “Like” symbol for Facebook (42 percent), QR codes (28 percent), the Hashtags for Twitter (18 percent), and Shazam symbols (9 percent).