Group items tagged

1. Provide instructions near the QR Code

2. Give people an incentive

3. Educate your audience ahead of time

Many experts recommend that your company have a social media crisis plan, but few companies actually take the time to think it through.

Consider some of the ways that a social media crisis plan could go wrong:   Two people from the company issue apologies through different mediums without talking with one another. This could cause miscommunication and one may promise something that the other did not. Worse yet, the two parties could promote conflicting ideas.The crisis plan may have been set into motion too late. If a member of a company is not very active on social media, he/she could potentially not hear of the crisis until a few days later.The crisis plan may be set for something less serious. If the crisis is serious to the company, yet it not treated that way, people could get very upset.

Step #1: Communicate with everyone in the company about who is going to be the spokesperson for both mishaps.

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.

QR codes have reported the largest growth (63%) in the past six months. Activation through mobile can be a great opportunity to extend the conversation from a traditional medium and represents a tracking mechanism. However, it is only as good as the content provided; it needs to be done at the right time with the right content, providing value to the consumer.

visual (QR codes), mobile visual search (Google Goggles), audio (Shazam), and native (SMS, MMS).

According to comScore, 45% of all Facebook traffic and 55% of all Twitter traffic is mobile.

Per ScanLife’s recent 2012 quarterly report consumers are scanning a lot more now, by about157% from this same time last year.

Today, more consumers are attached to smart phones and other such devices than they have ever been in the past. This has created an opportunity that businesses have been unable to ignore. QR codes have been identified as an effective way to reach out to these consumers, and many companies have begun using the black and white barcodes to promote goods and services. These companies have found that using QR codes can be tricky, however, with many failing to utilize them effectively.

Mobile Marketer has put out a summary of a new HowToGoMo presentation by Google that shows that mobile web is growing at eight times the rate of the desktop Internet.

Dissatisfied consumers could quickly move on to competitors at a time digital sales are one of the few bright spots in holiday retailing, Tack says.

November and December online sales (excluding travel) are expected to grow 16.8% from last year to $46.7 billion, research company eMarketer says.

Nearly half of smartphone and tablet users plan to make holiday purchases with a mobile device this year, according to a study conducted by Ipsos for PayPal.

20.1 million mobile phone owners in the U.S. used their devices to scan a QR code in the three-month average period ending October 2011. In the big scheme of things, this isn’t a large number. However, the number of people using QR codes is expected to grow.

1. Reinventing the Shopping Experience

2. Enhancing the User Experience

of all the users who made an in-app purchase, 44 percent did not do so until they had interacted with an app at least 10 times. Only 22 percent made a purchase in the first session and 33 percent made a purchase between sessions two and nine.

A Localytics study from last year, for example, found that 26 percent of apps are used only once after being downloaded.

Did you know that the U.S. now has more wireless customer connections than people? There are currently estimated to be 327.6 million active wireless customer connections in the U.S. The nation’s population is estimated by the U.S. Census Bureau to be roughly 312 million. This means that today there are now more active broadband tablets, cell phones, and mobile devices than people in this country.

If you represent a big brand or even a medium size business, you should take this as a strong signal that if you don’t have a mobile strategy now is the time to figure one out. Right now, you are potentially missing out on a consumer base that is accessing the mobile Web in masses and is growing rapidly.

Google Android: 38.1% Apple: 26.6% RIM: 24.7% Microsoft: 5.8% Symbian: 2.1%

Newly released figures from Scanbuy show that during a six-week period this summer consumers who bought a large drink or meal at Taco Bell scanned a two-dimensional bar code on the items 427,994 times, making the Taco Bell/MTV promotion the biggest single campaign this year for Scanbuy Inc.

it is expected that in the United States alone, there will be 115.8 million smartphone users by the time this year comes to an end.

Statistics indicate that 64 percent of smartphone owners already take part in mobile commerce.

New program helps visitors to learn more about the city.

QR code use is the ideal way to share this information.

It allows visitors to the city to play a game where they must scan the barcodes at various different locations found throughout Dallas. When they perform a scan, they are provided with a trivia question or a task that must be completed. Each time they answer correctly or finish the required activity, they gain points. Those can be accumulated in order to earn prizes.

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.

Unfortunately, many of the consumers find that even when they do know what QR codes are and they use their mobile devices to scan them, they rapidly discover that the mobile marketers didn’t take the time to make the scan worthwhile. For example, if all the code does is direct the user to the homepage of a website, there will be a far poorer response than if scanning the code allows the smartphone owner to gain access to an exclusive discount coupon.

Among the main problems are that while they have become highly popular among companies, many consumers still haven’t figured out what they are. This is a slow learning process that is catching on, but that hasn’t included the majority of smartphone users quite yet.

Giving the consumer an option to scan a QR code which leads them to a website that is not optimized for the device they use to scan it is like sending someone with a broken arm in to get a full-body physical. People use QR codes to take action directly, so don’t make them jump through hoops, pinching, zooming and navigating through a messy desktop site. Give them what they want: a mobile experience.

the QR codes that perform far better are the ones that offer consumers a benefit for scanning.  This means providing a discount, special offer or inclusion in some sort of exclusive program in order to provide customers a return on investment for their time. Of course, clever marketers can find plenty of ways to provide a reward for scanning while still integrating plenty of branding as well.

When customers scan the QR code, according to Mobile Commerce Daily, they’ll be taken to a Johnny Rockets’ mobile-friendly landing page where they’ll be asked to provide their name, address, city, state, zip code, and the location of the Johnny Rockets they go to the most.

They’ve placed the QR codes on table tents in their restaurants, which gives consumers ample time to scan them with their phones.

Why are U.S. retailers slow to adopt NFC payment technology? One reason is the expense and effort required to install NFC-enabled point-of-sale equipment in stores and to integrate it with merchants' systems.

It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg dynamic: Retailers typically don't invest in offering a new payment option until they see widespread consumer demand; but few consumers are likely to prefer a payment option that's not yet widely accepted.

Another Open Mobile Summit panelist, PayPal's VP for mobile, David Marcus, made this point: "Today, retailers learn about customers at the least effective time -- just when they're leaving the store. They'd like to know about you when you arrive at the store, so they can customize your shopping experience and treat you properly."