Something that really struck me was the inordinate number of QR codes in the magazine. Front and back cover, and nearly every ad and article inside had a code attached.

I think QR codes can be a very useful and valuable tool. But as with most things I talk about here, they’re only good as long as they are easy to use and provide value for the customer.

In a bit of an experiment, I scanned all 20 QR codes in the magazine – only two went to a mobile optimised version of their site. One didn’t work all together and the kicker for me was the one for a business that specialises in mobile applications that went to their standard web site.

While a normal website can be viewed on a smart phone, the experience is not awesome. Images and text become small and illegible, and you have to drag around the page to navigate it all. If a site is optimised for mobile however, the experience is much better.

Experience is everything.

Secondly, you need to think about WHY you are using the QR code. Are you offering anything of value that might make it worth their while? As an example, all I landed on when I scanned the magazine’s QR code was a non optimised subscription page. No value to me.

Think about what you want people to do when they get there. It’s like building Facebook fans – awesome to have, but what are you delivering to them in terms of value?

Remember – value and experience – these two things should be the foundation of everything you do.

Yes, that QR code above does actually work. It’s a little gem from Scott Stratten on bad use of QR codes – plenty you can learn from here. And for those of you who don’t want to scan it, you can watch it below.

Because these people have a direct creative impact on the output of the product, it doesn’t feel awkward and can work.

I snapped this photo yesterday while driving home, and wasn’t sure what to think. It feels to me like it is reaching for credibility – is there any affinity with a publisher of a book? Maybe with Penguin books, but to me, it comes down to the author.

I see this like trying to get me to watch Hot Tub Time Machine by telling me it’s from the same distributor as Gone with the Wind.

It’s the same as establishing yourself online – don’t drop a name unless you have had a direct impact on output for people to judge. You need to let your content and work speak for itself, and not tenuously link yourself to other people or businesses to try and build a profile.

What do you think?

Is “publisher of” enough to make you buy a book? Is the link too tenuous?

What do you make of businesses / people who do do this?

I snapped this photo the other day while dining with client at a local restaurant. While I was going to check in anyway, when I saw the prompt I immediately thought there might be some sort of offer attached to it.

But guess what? Nothing. I tried it on both Facebook and FourSquare. But nothing on either.

No incentive, no reward, no free glass of wine.

It’s great that they are wanting people to check in and create a social experience for their diners, but what they are missing is an answer to something that has become part of human behavior – “what’s in it for me?”.

There have been numerous studies (and continue to be new ones published all the time) that put discounts and promotions as one of the main reason people interact with brands on social networks.

In this case, checking in is great for the business – it spreads the word to friends and fans that you are there and therefore gets their name out. But unless I am getting something in return, it’s unlikely that I will do so again.

If you’re going to prompt your customers to connect with you, give them a reason to do so. It doesn’t have to be huge. Enough to make them feel important and keep them coming back.

There has been already so much coverage of what the new features are, so I am not going to highlight them here, but I now get where they are going.

I like the idea of instant personalisation without the need to connect.

I like the idea of the timeline, and the greater detail within it. I like what will appears to be a more intuitive and semantic way of updating it.

I like what they have done with some of their partnerships, particularly with Yahoo.

I really like that they are doing cool stuff with Hulu within Facebook.

I’m not a developer, so the changes to the API are a bit lost on me, but if I were, I imagine I would like that too. Any day now I am expecting a slew of updates for WordPress plugins that leverage these new changes and make experiences better.

These things I like.

I still think the news feed is a mess, and needs work. I think there needs to be a much simpler way for you to determine what you want to see. The ticker on the right of profiles is a mess, because everything is turned ON by default. Unless I can’t see it, the only way to tidy it up is on a per friend basis.

What they have announced today is great. For developers. Which will ultimately make user experience better. What would be great is if they had given the same sort of rationale and context for users on why they changed the news feed.

What I am yet to see in all of this though is the impact on pages. With the changes in how content feeds to news feeds, top stories and the likes, surely it has to impact brand pages. There has been a lot written about optimisation to ensure you show up in the news feed. Will this change? We will see.

PHOTO – dtweney

The changes Facebook has introduced over the last few days ahead of the F8 Developer conference have been met with what seems to be more outcry that usual from users, and I suspect will probably be at fever pitch if Robert Scoble’s Google+ update is anything to go by.

Change for many is a difficult thing to handle, and I think where Facebook has tipped the scales this time is too much change in one go, messing with the news feed and adding the subscribe button in the space of a few days.

I never usually have an issue, but this time is different. Personally I have never seen the value in Top Stories when compared to Most Recent updates, and Facebook have made it clear that their shift is to focus on the former. For me, I want to know what is happening now.

Obviously all changes they make are linked to two things – audience and revenue. But if you make it difficult or unpleasant for the audience, then revenue suffers as a result. With such a big shift, they need to make it much easier to customize an experience.

Their privacy settings page make it fairly clear on what to do when it comes to the updates you share, but it needs another layer – they updates you want to see (not part of privacy obviously, but an interface that is just as simple to use). Not an assumption based on an algorithm, but a clear declaration of intent and interest.

Facebook needs to make their opt in for updates / news feed items as clear as the privacy control dialoge

What is exciting for me though is the introduction of new buttons that are being planned – in addition to “like”, there will be “watched”, “read” “listened” and I’ve seen speculation that developers will be able to look at creating their own. This is a major step forward and will be of particular interest to brands from a product perspective, making it much more indicative of intent than just “like”.

A side note on Google+

Just a quick footnote, in other exciting (and well timed news), Google+ is finally out of invite only, which can only be a good thing.

While invites have been freely available to the “field trial”, this finally opens it up. Which is good, considering when you look at the stats published by Digital Buzz show that almost 75% of the top 10 occupations of users are tech related.

There is so much more application potential within the platform other than discussing with each other what it does, and hopefully this will realise that.

In my past post, I talked about how I thought Google+ was going to hit Twitter the hardest. So far, no one has lost any major ground to it. What it has done however, and best of all, is drive one of the biggest shifts in functionality and innovation in social we have seen in a while. Which ultimately is a good thing.

UPDATE – Ben Parr over at Mashable has seen what is coming, and claims “On Thursday, developers will be elated, users will be shellshocked and the competition will look ancient. On Thursday, Facebook will be reborn. Prepare yourselves for the evolution of social networking.” Check out the post here.

PHOTO – toodlepip

I’ve spent about 4 days inside Google+ so far, and I have to say, I’m sold (if you’re on there and want to connect, find me at gplus.to/benshute). I’m not going to give you an in and out of the features, plenty of others have already done that.

A lot of what I have read by other social media bloggers, and people using it in general, is the pondering what sort of effect it will have on other social networks, in particular Facebook.

For me, I don’t believe it’s going to impact Facebook in terms of user base in a massive way. I think there will be a shift in behaviour, no doubt, but I think that Facebook’s 750 million odd users are pretty safe.

Personal Investment

So why won’t it make an impact? It comes down to personal investment. Facebook has had a hell of a head start, and we need to consider the sheer volume of information that we have already committed to Facebook. Your friends, your photos, all your links, your events (even your farms….)

To port this to a new platform is simply to start all over again (given Facebook has banned Google+ from advertising, I wouldn’t hold my breath for any sort of export feature).

Can people truly be bothered? I doubt it. I think that many will sign up for an account once it’s public, but I think that they will use it differently.

For me, I can already see where that split is. Everyone who I have in my Google+ Circles so far are business or interest related. There are a handful of friends, but the information I find myself commenting and sharing in there is business related. I’m also finding it easier to discover more great content in there and filter it according to my interests.

For me, Google + will become a business centric platform, and Facebook will get back to being about friends. It won’t be that way for everyone, but I believe that people will use it in different ways

Why Twitter Should Be Worried

If you use Twitter, you know it is full of noise. Even with multiple third party tools for making filtering of content easier, there is still an awful lot of stuff on there, where the useful gets lost between motivational quotes, spam and offers of how to get more followers in 10 minutes (oh that’s right, I already said spam).

Google+ makes the reasons and process of how I use Twitter easier. It allows me to discover interesting content much easier, by splitting up my interest groups, it allows me to engage with those sharing that content (and others) much easier and more in line and it is easier for me to then re-share that content.

I think this will be something that a lot of Twitter users will find appealing.

The same personal investment that users have put into Facebook isn’t the same as Twitter. Sure, you may have posted thousands of tweets, but unlike Facebook older tweets and links are lost almost as soon as they are published, pushed further down the feed by aforementioned spam and other rubbish. So once it’s gone, what’s it worth?

Overall, Google has an advantage of already having the scale to make a real impact in the social space, but if you consider it in the context of these other major players, Twitter should be the one watching its back.

What do you think? Are you on Google+? How are you finding it?

One of the foundations of social is that is a conversation and not to “sell”, rather provide valuable and useful content that then leads to customer acquisition and then in turn into a potential sale.

That’s not to say that you can’t try and sell, but doing it straight off the bat is not the right way to go. Creating and providing this useful content is part of what I like to call a “window of trust” – a passage of time that passes before you’ve provided enough value that then pitching a product or a service is not unreasonable.

To give you an example, one of the sites that I own and contribute to recently launched its first product – after 2 years of creating and providing free content. We’ve built a good rapport with our readers, they trust us and value what we have provided.

Will every single one of them buy the product? Absolutely not. But some will, and probably more than would have if we had launched it one year ago, and certainly more than would have if we tried to sell it on launch.

That 2 year window of trust has built value and a base of people that will be interested in a product that we’ve demonstrated provides a useful service.

How long does your window of trust need to be before you can try to sell?

I was just heading home in the car and a quit smoking ad came on. Now there are a million quit smoking ads on TV and radio – some use shock tactics, some use a disco band, others use positive reinforcement to quit.

But this one was different. No fancy bells and whistles, just one guy telling you that smoker’s cough is the least of your problems, and there is a revolutionary new treatment to flush nicotine out of your system and and get rid of cravings (as a non smoker, I can’t imagine how hard it is to fight these). But the next thing he said was “for a free quit smoking guide, visit our website”.

In this case, the sell went straight up front – “we have the cure”, which was then followed up by the offer and provision of useful, free information.

Your window of trust will depend on who you’re selling to. Smoking is one of those things that people are looking for anything they can to quit, so the space of a 30 second radio ad could be enough. Business services much longer.

Understand what it takes for your customers to buy and how long before they do. Spend that time delivering great service, information and assistance. Then sell.

PHOTO - Sizima

But how long can it sustain? While I’m not ready to call time on it just yet, I think there are several key factors that might push it off the radar in the near future and into the hands of those who provide the offers – in other words, retailers owning the experience.

Retailers Owning the Experience

When you consider how people interact with brands on Facebook, the “Like” button has become one of the most powerful statements of brand affinity. Then when you look at research like this, a large number of those people “Like” a brand to get access to discounts or promotions.

For retailers, there is a real opportunity for this model to work, and activate a base of users that have already expressed an interest in hearing from the brand.

Add to that the tools and the ability to run a group based now being within the reach of pretty much everyone, the dependence of retail on group buying sites will shift. There is even rumour that within Facebook’s new Deals on Facebook product, retailers will be able to run these for free, eliminating the middle man and no longer having to pay a cut.

Relevance

It’s no secret that not every offer is relevant to the audience, which is why there is never just one deal, and not just one group buying site. But despite being able to select a locale and maybe some interest based categories at registration, there will still only be a finite number of offers in my area that I consider worth purchasing.

Increasing the relevance of offers is important in keeping audience, but because of the model, there is only so niche your offer can get before you run out of people needed to reach the offer tipping point.

Saturated Marketplace

Typically with the rapid ascent of a concept comes a glut of competitors in the marketplace. Group buying has become saturated very quickly, already leaving little or no room for no competitors in the market to deliver truly original or valuable deals.

I know people who are signed up to 4 or 5 group buying sites, and the offers tend to be very similar each day. The risk being run here is deal fatigue, where a user sees the same thing every day, and eventually opts out or narrows their subscription.

If you are guaranteed of an offer from a favourite retailer or merchant, then surely that becomes a much more attractive proposition than filtering emails in the hope of finding one that sticks.

As I said, I think there is still some time left in the model, as most retailers are still coming to grips with the notion of social media as a marketing channel, but before long I think we will see a pretty significant shift away from pure group buying sites into either a proprietary model for retailers or platforms of scale like Facebook where theybecome an integral part of the experience of the site rather than the experience themselves.

What do you think?

PHOTO – isabel bloedwater

So many books today that talk about this new world of how business is done focus very heavily on social media tools, but here, Stratten focuses on breaking down conventions of doing business, and plugs in the social tools where needed.

He looks at how businesses should think about customers and the interactions with them. One of my favourite examples in the book is in the chapter on Stirring Coffee (Ch. 28).

Much like Scott, I drink a lot of coffee, and tend to get it from the same couple of places, depending on where I am. A cup of coffee may not cost much, but a loyal customer can end up spending tens of thousands of dollars over a period of years if it’s good. Which is why you need to make sure that you continue to deliver to existing customers.

He talks about the barriers that we put up between us and the customer that we don’t even think about. How focused is your website on your users? Have you considered the impact that things like Captcha and comment moderation are having on their experience? These are the kind of gems you find in here.

There are many more in the book, including examples of companies that have done it well and not so well.

Scott is a well known speaker, and when you read the book, he has imbued the book with the same tone and passion that he speaks with.

Another recommended read for anyone wanting to do better business with their customers.

For those of you in Sydney, it’s stocked at Dymocks on George Street and Pitt Street, and also available online at Amazon. And don’t forget to connect with Scott on Twitter @unmarketing and check out his site www.unmarketing.com

PHOTO – photodreamz

I hear a lot of people talking about the need to have senior management talking the new language of social media. I don’t agree necessarily.

While it is a fact that social can’t be ignored as a channel, why is it that you need to have those above speak your language in order to get it? If you understand it and the value it can provide, then you should be able to put it in their language.

The key to aiding understanding of anything, not just social, is justification and example. Theory alone is not enough, because management practice is full of theory.

If you can demonstrate meaningful results that are being achieved and show HOW they were achieved, then you are some of the way there.

Think about which of these statements is more powerful:

• “We need to be using social media”
• “We need to be using social media because our competitor is”
• “Our competitor generated an extra $10,000 sales this week through offers to their Facebook community. I think it’s something we should explore”

It’s the last one, obviously.

Start with a result, and make it tangible. Speak in their language, know what pushes their buttons. Is it sales? Is it leads? Is it customer service? Find the sweet spot and provide evidence. Show them HOW it’s done.