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53 percent of Americans haven’t ever used a QR code.

47 percent of people using QR codes, however, is still a significant amount.

71 percent of respondents said that QR codes are “pointless.” 68 percent of this particular demographic said that they’d rather just type in a company’s web address

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.

As part of their Q1 2012 Consumer Benchmark Survey, customer experience (CX) research and consulting firm, Temkin Group asked 10,000 U.S. consumers about their QR Code usage. Results show that 24% of consumers are using QR Codes but the usage is heavily weighted towards younger consumers (chart below). Approximately one-third of consumers younger than 40 years old use QR Codes at least a couple of times per month.

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).

1 billion consumers will own smartphones by 2016, with U.S. users owning 257 million smartphones and 126 million tablets. By 2016, 350 million employees will use smartphones, with 200 million of them bringing their own.

Mobile spending will reach $1.3 trillion by 2016, or 35 percent of the technology economy, with the app market generating $56 billion by 2015.

Apple, Google and Microsoft are expected to control 91 percent of the U.S. smartphone market and 98 percent of the U.S. tablet market by 2016.

Adobe Flash is officially no longer available for Android devices. This raises a tough question for Web developers: whether to support Flash at all, and how to migrate a Flash investment for the next-generation of Web users.

Web developers have responded by moving away from Flash. Since last year, Flash usage on Web sites has declined from 27% to 23%, according to W3Techs. In comparison: Microsoft's Silverlight barely moves the needle with deployment of 0.3%, just above Java's 0.2%. JavaScript is used by over 92% of sites. HTML5 is reportedly in active use on 34% of the top 100 Web sites.

Adobe is hoping developers and users will adopt the Adobe AIR (“Adobe Integrated Runtime”) format, which extends many of the core Flash technologies in a cross-platform framework for deploying Web applications. AIR is available for Android, iOS, BlackBerry, Windows, OSX, and Linux.

According to new data out from comScore, the total number of Americans who own mobile devices now tops 234M, with 90M of which being smartphones.

Mobile Web browsers were used by 44% of subscribers — up 2.9%

Youth marketing agency Archival Youth Marketing have conducted a survey of over 500 students on 24 college campuses across the US to find out what they think about QR Codes. Of the students surveyed 81% owned a smartphone and 80% had previously seen a QR code. 21% of the students successfully scanned a QR Code when shown an example and 75% of the students said they are “Not Likely” to scan a QR code in the future. (The infographic below is reproduced with the express permission of Archival)

From January to August, MRI measured more than 72,000 ads. Five percent of them contained QR or snap codes, up from 1.3 percent in the second half of 2010.

And the mere presence of the codes seems to get readers more involved with the ads containing them—of those who saw an ad with a mobile barcode, five percent took a picture of it with their cell phones.

By comparison, 14 percent who saw an ad visited the advertiser's website

Where phones cannot scan

In-flight magazines

On the side of buses

mobile web traffic has risen as much as 35% since July 2011.

 mobile traffic represented an average of 10.55% of total web traffic during the last week of February 2012, which shows a growth of 34.44% when compared to the earlier report.

PCs still holding on to 89.45% of all traffic

Apple's and Samsung's combined worldwide market share at the end of the second quarter was 48.1 percent. By the end of the year, that figure could hit 49.7 percent. And by the conclusion of 2013, their combined share could reach 52.3 percent.

The abrupt, unexpected rise of native mobile apps starting in 2008 — after a decade-plus of stumbling, fumbling attempts at mobile versions of the Web — forced a radical rethink of interactive design principles.

However, in the rush to jump on the bandwagon and join in with this critical new channel, they are forgetting to educate their own employees, and it is hurting the efficacy of any efforts that they are making.

After all, mobile isn’t just new to companies and their marketing campaigns. It’s new to consumers, too. Many of them haven’t had their smartphones for more than a few months, and they’re still discovering what is possible. Though they may have heard of the popular services that businesses are joining by the thousands, these consumers may not yet know how to make them work on their own devices.

Equally, if QR codes are being posted on advertising, signage, or menus as a part of a mobile commerce campaign, then it is important to make sure that the staff – especially those who will be interacting with the customers that could be using those barcodes – understand what they are and that they can be scanned with smartphones when a scanning app has been installed on the device. That simple information can be enough to encourage its use by the consumer.

Determine the kind of value you aim to derive for yourself and your followers from using the hashtag. Do you intend to crowdsource information? Do you aim to create buzz? Are you looking to provoke conversation? Make sure your intentions and purpose for employing the hashtag are clear and focused. Formulate a hashtag that is relevant to your purpose and the subject you intend to tweet about.  Check to see if the hashtag you have in mind already exists and is in use. It is also very important to check if your desired hashtag has not taken on some other meaning. Twitter Search, Hashtags.org and Tagalus are some tools you can use to do a quick hashtag check.  Start tweeting your hashtag. It helps to set the context of your hashtag by briefly explaining what it means. Tweet with moderation. The last thing you want is to be seen as a spammer. Always ask what value you and your followers can get from the tweet you are putting out.  If it does not exist yet, add your hashtag definition to online tools such as Tagalus.  Set up an automatic alert tool that sends you an email alert when someone tweets your hashtag. Twilert is one such tool.

The concept itself is deceptively simple; just add the “#” symbol in front of a word or a group of words with the spaces between them taken out.

By including a relevant hashtag in your tweet, it becomes visible to people searching for that specific topic, adding your voice to the general discussion. Conversely, hashtags automatically narrow down your audience, allowing your tweets to reach and engage only those interested in the same subject matter.

While overall smartphone penetration stood at 48 percent in January, those in the 25-34 age group showed the greatest proportion of smartphone ownership, with 66 percent saying they had a smartphone. In the same age group, 8 of 10 of those that had gotten a new device in the last three months chose a smartphone. Among those who chose a device in the last three months, more than half of those under 65 had chosen a smartphone.