Is Flickr still relevant in today’s social media mix?

Kate Potter writes…

Over a year ago I wrote a blog post called Seven reasons why I use Flickr. The post talked about how Flickr might be under threat, but I still enjoyed using it for a number of reasons (seven being that number).

Funnily enough, it’s actually the most popular post here on the Hughes PR blog! Primarily because of search engine traffic – hundreds of people have found my blog post from typing a simple question into Google: “why use Flickr?”

It seems that question is being asked more and more these days as further doubts are raised about Flickr’s ability to keep up with the new kids on the photo-sharing block.

Recently, Gizmodo featured an article headlined How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet. Gizmodo explains how Yahoo, after acquiring Flickr, didn’t dedicate sufficient resources to the site, instead focussing on its more profitable business units such as Yahoo Mail.

Gizmodo editor Mat Honan writes:

“It missed the boat on local, on real time, on mobile, and even ultimately on social-the field it pioneered. And so, it never became the Flickr of video; YouTube snagged that ring. It never became the Flickr of people, which was of course Facebook. It remained the Flickr of photos. At least, until Instagram came along.”

So should I still use Flickr? Yes, I still think it’s a valuable service for what I need it for.

Should clients still use Flickr? Maybe. The service’s declining participation by users and an increasingly fragmented audience mean that there might be better platforms out there for hosting photos and sharing them with target audiences.

Mat says in the spirited comments that follow the article that the point of his story is “that Flickr had a chance to be a lot more than a mere niche site”. But that’s something that Flickr still has going for it – the site has its niche and does a few things very well.

What are your thoughts? Is Flickr an abandoned social network, with tumbleweeds rolling through it? Or is it still a valuable tool for photographers and those who need access to high quality images?

Hughes PR is a communications and public relations consultancy with proven and extensive experience in publicity and media relations, issues management, crisis management, digital media and social media strategy and implementation, community consultation, event management, media training, publications and strategic problem solving. Find out more.

Tags: digital media, Facebook, Flickr, Gizmodo, Instagram, Photography, social media, Yahoo, youtube

How to score your first PR job

Kieran Hall writes…

When I got my first job in public relations, things were different. Newspapers were the primary source of daily information, fax machines had a legitimate reason for being and iPhones didn’t exist. And that was only five years ago.

The roles, responsibilities and skill set of a good PR practitioner have also evolved considerably during that time and continue to do so as digital media and social networking sites broaden the way we communicate with each other.

And yet despite all of this change, the key fundamentals of landing that all-important first job in PR remain largely intact.

So what can you do to improve your chances of breaking into the industry and begin carving out a career in communications?

Here are my top five tips:

1. Get work experience. I know I’m stating the bleeding obvious here, but organising work experience with a PR agency is a great way to develop skills and expand your networks. And you never know where it could lead, so treat work experience like an audition, get involved as much as you can and don’t be afraid to ask questions.
2. Finetune your writing skills. To be an effective communicator, you must be able to write – and write well. Whether compiling your CV for a prospective employer or drafting a story pitch for a journalist, the words you type often constitute the first contact you make with people you’re trying to persuade, so be sure those words are engaging, coherent and correctly spelt! So practice, and if you have to, take a writing class.
3. Network. I know it can be daunting and sometimes a drag but giving up a night on the couch watching MasterChef for an industry networking event can certainly be worth the effort. Get out there and meet people, share your ambitions, connect on social networks and keep in touch to ensure you’re top of mind when those job vacancies come up.
4. Build your knowledge of social media. As more companies look to integrate social media into their PR mix, a sound understanding of all things digital is valuable. Continue to learn about the latest trends and showcase your skills by being active in online conversations.
5. Become a media observer. Listen, watch, read and learn about all forms of media, including press, radio, TV and online. Familiarise yourself with the names of journalists and the rounds they cover, as well as the way in which they report and what is deemed newsworthy. Appreciating how a journalist thinks is critical in PR.

There are no doubt many more considerations for PR jobseekers and I invite you to respond with any tips of your own.

In the meantime, remember that the best opportunities generally go to the cream of the crop so be willing to go that extra mile to develop your skills, expand your networks and build your personal brand to help get your foot in the door.

Hughes PR is a communications and public relations consultancy with proven and extensive experience in publicity and media relations, issues management, crisis management, digital media and social media strategy and implementation, community consultation, event management, media training, publications and strategic problem solving. Find out more.

Tags: communications, digital media, Hughes PR, job, kieran hall, media, media training, PR agency, public relations, public relations consultancy, social media, social networking, work experience, writing skills

Happy Foursquare Day!

Kate Potter writes…

Yesterday was “Foursquare Day” – a day to celebrate the location-based social media platform, Foursquare.

Foursquare Swarm Badge

Foursquare is a unique social media tool – users “check in” to venues or locations. As they do, they get alerted to “tips” that other users have left for that venue and often unlock special deals from the venue owners. Check into a venue often enough and you might beat all of the others users to become the “mayor” of the venue!

Foursquare is a review service, offers discounts, and allows users to catch up with friends. While similar to Facebook places, it’s unique in that it offers opportunities to get free stuff, save money, see what other users are saying about the venue, and one important difference – Foursquare makes location-based social media a game.

‘Gamification’ has been a buzz word for a couple of years now, and Foursquare has gamified their platform very effectively. Every check in earns you points, and every now and then a check in will unlock a “badge”. It’s like Girl Scouts for the social media world!

Recently, while in Darwin on a work trip I checked in on Foursquare at the Darwin Sailing Club. Half an hour later I got a Foursquare notification that one of my Adelaide friends had also checked in at the same venue. We were both in Darwin at the same time and probably wouldn’t have realised it if it weren’t for Foursquare – and we were able to catch up!

For businesses, it’s an important platform to keep an eye on. I’ll always remember my experience checking into a Government department service office late last year. The first “tip” that came up after my check in: “People come here to die.” I looked at a few other tips, all of which contained a similarly negative tone, such as “Hope you found a good park. You’ll be here a while…”.

This illustrates the importance of monitoring this network, because even if you don’t create an entry for your venue or location, people will do it for you.  And the “tips” they give other users will be a reflection on their experience.

It’s worth mentioning that while Foursquare is a great social media network with lots of benefits, some social media users don’t like the platform because they feel uncomfortable about people knowing their location. However, as with any social network, YOU choose how much you want to share and with whom. My suggestion is to make sure you only accept Foursquare friend requests from people you know and trust “in real life”.

Yesterday, on Foursquare Day, Adelaide social media group #socadl organised a Foursquare “Swarm” – when 50 users check into a location at the same time, they all unlock the Swarm badge. Hughes PR consultant Natalie Ciccocioppo and I enjoyed seeing the numbers climb, and cracking the 50 – earning ourselves a Swarm badge!

Another badge for the virtual Girl Scout sash – time to chase the next!

Hughes PR is a communications and public relations consultancy with proven and extensive experience in publicity and media relations, issues management, crisis management, digital media and social media strategy and implementation, community consultation, event management, media training, publications and strategic problem solving. Find out more.

Tags: Foursquare, social media

Twitter strategy brings cheer to Cellar Door Wine Festival

This article originally appeared in The Advertiser on 20 March 2012.

Cellar Door Wine Festival Twitter wall. Photo by Simon Casson

SOCIAL media strategies for a wine festival made it a top 10-trending tweet in Adelaide for a weekend.

Hughes PR analysis of the festival held last month showed its dedicated hashtag, #cdwf, and username @cellardoorfest were used in almost 1500 separate tweets during the event.

Digital and media consultant Kate Potter said the agency calculated that event publicity reached more than 98,000 people on Twitter and created more than one million impressions.

Ms Potter said the figures were boosted by the Convention Centre marketing team installing a giant projection screen to create a Twitter wall at the event that showed tweets in a rolling feed.

“You could see it from anywhere at the event so that whenever people mentioned the cellar door handle or hashtag their tweet would come up on the Twitter wall,” Ms Potter said.

“It created this huge traffic at the festival and then to all of the followers of those tweeting.”

The carefully orchestrated digital and media strategy started with a specific hashtag being chosen for the event so it had a clear Twitter and Facebook conversation that could be followed.

Ms Potter said after this, each winery involved with the event was contacted to ensure it used that specific hashtag when tweeting about the event.

This included about 90 of the 150 wineries involved who were already on Twitter.

The next prong in the marketing approach was to invite recognised social media “influencers” to the launch, those who have large followings and those who were well-known wine bloggers.

“We needed the initial boost from wineries and social media influencers to push the hashtag to the top of the Adelaide Twitter conversation,” Ms Potter said.

There was also a dedicated website and a Facebook site.

The convention centre used the Facebook site to run competitions and it provided an avenue for social pictures of the event so people could tag themselves and share the photographs.

“People could also go onto Facebook and ask for information or provide feedback,” Ms Potter said.

The same hype is being created around other big events during March with Ms Potter saying at various venues around town there were constant tweets to follow, helping festival or fringe visitors choose their next event.

“At Womadelaide you could see a tweet from someone saying they had just sat down and the artist was awesome … there was a big conversation happening in real time,” Ms Potter said.

“For these events it’s word of mouth, when you hear something is awesome from one person and then another you think `they must be awesome’ and you go across to that stage.”

Are you Pinterested?

Natalie Ciccocioppo writes… 

Pinterest: it’s the new black of the social media world.

With over 11 million unique visitors per month, Pinterest became the fastest standalone website in history to generate more than 10 million page views per month.

The estimated unique visitors to Pinterest.com increased by 429 percent over a three month period from September to December 2011.

And did you know measurement data has shown that last month Pinterest drove more traffic to online publishers than Twitter?

So, what’s Pinterest all about?

Pinterest describes itself as ‘a virtual pinboard’,

“Pinterest allows you to organise and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. You can browse pinboards created by other people to discover new things and get inspiration from people who share your interests.”

Like Twitter, people can ‘follow’ users on Pinterest. Pinterest users create boards, and bookmark, or ‘pin’ the content that they like to those boards.

From a user perspective, Pinterest can be a particularly useful bookmarking tool to gather ideas, for example, when planning an event big or small, a holiday or a craft or home decorating project.

You can ‘pin’ images of a particular style or fashion era that interests you, your dream car, or it might even be the place you find the dish that will impress your friends at your next dinner party.

As it continues to grow, increasingly more and more brands are recognising the opportunities that the platform presents and embracing all things Pinterest. Pinterest provides a platform for brands to engage with followers and build brand awareness and identity, while not necessarily being a direct sales tool.

International companies that have recently established a Pinterest presence include designer brand Kate Spade New York.

On Pinterest, Kate Spade New York is engaging with its followers by sharing imagery that appeals to them, all while remaining true to their design aesthetic and Kate Spade’s fun and playful brand personality. Kate Spade’s VP/eCommerce Johanna Murphy talked about using Pinterest in this Business Insider piece.

Just last week, Tourism Australia became one of the first major Australian brands to launch a presence on the popular site and at the time of writing had over 400 followers. A spokesperson explained their motivations behind this decision in this recent Mumbrella article.

There’s little doubt that the statistics are impressive and Pinterest can be an effective online marketing tool but before brands decide to start pinning, it’s important to assess whether Pinterest is a good fit with an overall communications and digital media strategy.

Does Pinterest tie in to your communications objectives? Does Pinterest fit in with your brand personality? Are your key demographics using Pinterest? What sort of content would you share? These are all questions that should be addressed before a presence is established.

Questions have also been raised about Pinterest and copyright. Last month, attorney and photographer Kirsten Kowalski made the decision to delete her Pinterest inspiration boards due to concerns of copyright infringement in pinning other people’s work.

It’s definitely one to watch – things could get very pinteresting!

Hughes PR is a communications and public relations consultancy with proven and extensive experience in publicity and media relations, issues management, crisis management, digital media and social media strategy and implementation, community consultation, event management, media training, publications and strategic problem solving. Find out more.

Tags: communications, community consultation, copyright, crisis management, digital media, event management, Hughes PR, hughes public relations, issues management, Kate Spade, media, media relations, media training, Mumbrella, natalie ciccocioppo, Pinterest, publications, publicity, social media, social media strategy, Tourism Australia, twitter

20 years ago today…

Tim Hughes writes…

“It was 20 years ago today …” So go the lyrics to the Beatles song “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”.

The Beatles at a press conference

Twenty years on from establishing Hughes Public Relations, there are few practicing public relations professionals who would ever have known those words, let alone remember them. Similarly, they wouldn’t remember type-writers, teletext machines, and our industry’s reliance on couriers to deliver urgent news releases to clients for approval – and to media for coverage.

A lot has changed – for the better.

Over the past 20 years, I have seen the widespread adoption of mobile phones and mobile technologies (I look back and laugh at the brick phone I invested in when I started the consultancy in 1992!); the advent of the internet; the establishment of email as the instant global communication tool; the emergence of digital media including social media, citizen journalism and the delivery of instant, global news to our fingertips 24/7.

New technologies have brought many opportunities to the public relations profession. We have been able to lift our sights geographically and look after our clients’ global needs from one location; we can reach media around the world at the touch of a button; and demand for our services as ‘brand managers’ as a result of the instant transmission of news, the rapid escalation of issues and their exponential global spread has led to our services being more highly valued by business and government.

New technologies have also brought challenges. In 1992, I personally knew most of the journalists I dealt with; our clients’ marketplace lay largely within 20 kilometres of the office; and most just wanted to see themselves in the Adelaide media. Today, we are charged with delivering communication support to clients around the world; reaching audiences  who today don’t read newspapers, listen to radio or watch free to air TV but who instead glean their information and entertainment from the web, through social media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube and a myriad of special interest blogs and apps on their mobile phones and iPads.

The new global landscape has also placed far heavier responsibilities on the shoulders of professional communicators. Today, we are charged with managing the reputation (and value) of global brands in an unforgiving environment where instantly available information (or mis-information) can have a multi-million dollar positive or negative impact on the value of shares or sales.

Twenty years on, the fundamentals of business communication haven’t changed.

• Reputation (or brand) is vitally important to organisational success;
• Honesty (as opposed to “spin”), delivery of the “promise”, and transparency remain fundamental to a positive reputation;
• Effective communication strategies (tied irrevocably to business strategy) – and their timely delivery – are essential tools in promoting and protecting ‘brands’ in an increasingly crowded, competitive and ‘fickle’ global market.

Today, however, developing and delivering these strategies is far more complex – and that’s where experience counts.

Hughes PR is a communications and public relations consultancy in Adelaide with proven and extensive experience in publicity and media relations, issues management, crisis management, digital and social media, community engagement, event management, media training, publications and strategic problem solving. Find out more.

Tags: adelaide, communications, Hughes PR, hughes public relations, Tim Hughes

What Woody Harrelson’s Reddit disaster can teach us about social media

Today I wanted to touch on another “social media gone wrong” story – but this time it highlights personal branding, not company branding (although it could be argued that it ties into both). This social media stuff-up breaks two of the top “rules” in social media – rules which are vital to follow for social media success.

The interaction in question occurred on a website we haven’t discussed before here on the Hughes Public Relations blog, Reddit. I wasn’t quite sure how to describe Reddit, because it is a lot of different things, but Wikipedia has a nice concise description: “Reddit is a social news website where the registered users submit content, in the form of either a link or a text ‘self’ post. Other users then vote the submission ‘up’ or ‘down’, which is used to rank the post and determine its position on the site’s pages and front page.”

Reddit’s community is passionate, loyal, funny, and they have a lot of “in” jokes.

A unique part of Reddit is “AMA” – which stands for “ask me anything”. People head to AMA to talk about their unique stories – and anyone who has registered with the site can ask a question in the hope that it will be answered by the originator of the post. The posts are varied, anything from people talking about interesting home renovations, talking about their inter-cultural relationships, users answering questions about physical disabilities they have, and everything in between.

In the past, a couple of celebrities have done an AMA. Earlier this week, in fact, actress Ali Larter did an AMA which was well received by the Reddit community.

And then you get celebrities who might have heard that Reddit is a good place to reach a lot of people, people who are likely to belong to the right target audience for their latest project, and so these celebrities decide, unsurprisingly, to use Reddit as a communications channel to promote said project.

There’s a right way and a wrong way to do this. Comedian Louis CK did it the right way. He did an AMA which promoted his new project, but he was open to whatever the Reddit community threw at him. The questions were obviously answered by him, he spent a lot of time on it, and he didn’t shy away from any questions that were upvoted by the community for him to answer.

The wrong way? Actor Woody Harrelson showed us the wrong way to do an AMA. He told people he only had an hour to answer questions, and when someone questioned him on that, he told them “my time is valuable“. From what I can see, he answered a total of 15 questions out of thousands of comments that Redditors were putting to him. Answers were brief and for the most part, referred right back to the new movie he was promoting, Rampart.

You can read about how the full disaster went down on sites like Mediaite and the New York Observer, but for me I just wanted to focus on two very important social media lessons that we can all learn from this example.

Number one is the importance of listening to a community before diving in. You’ve got to learn about how it works, the etiquette, the way people use the platform. You don’t use LinkedIn the same way you use Twitter and you don’t use Twitter the same way you use Facebook. Each community has its own set of rules and ways to communicate. Reddit’s no different. I’ve been reading Reddit for many months now and I’m still working out how the community ticks!

Number two is something people can spot from a mile away – lack of authenticity. If you don’t show the social media community your true self, they’ll soon see right through it. Pretending to be something you’re not will get you nowhere.

These rules aren’t just for people selling a project, a product or an idea – they’re for all users of social media.

If you follow rule number one, you’ll soon see that the Reddit community don’t have any tolerance for inauthentic interactions by people who just want to sell them something. Watch out, you could find yourself created into a meme* before you know it!

*Don’t know what a meme is? A whole world of Internet sub-culture is about to open up to you. Start here.

Hughes PR is a communications and public relations consultancy in Adelaide with proven and extensive experience in publicity and media relations, issues management, crisis management, digital and social media, community engagement, event management, media training, publications and strategic problem solving. Find out more.

Tags: adelaide, communications, community engagement, crisis management, digital, event management, Hughes PR, issues management, media relations, media training, pubilcations, public relations consultancy, publicity, Reddit, social media, Woody Harrelson

Beware the perils of Address Book Importing

Are you unwittingly spamming your contacts?

Hayley Burwell writes…

Ever received an odd friend recommendation on Facebook and wondered how and why Facebook thought you knew each other? Or received a LinkedIn invitation to join someone’s professional network even though they work in a completely different industry and you can’t remember when or why you would ever have done business with them?

The chances are that you, or someone you’re connected to, however loosely or however long ago, has fallen victim to a seemingly innocuous technique called Address Book Importing (ABI).

ABI lies behind the majority of social networks’ ‘friend finding’ tools and any other platforms that rely on email correspondence such as competition entry or newsletter pages. If used carefully these tools are often an incredibly useful and time-efficient way of getting your addresses all in one place and creating and boosting online connections.

But, as always, there’s a catch.

I discovered the true power of ABI this weekend in an unfortunate incident that resulted in LinkedIn sending an invitation to everyone I had ever had contact with, however fleetingly, since I first entered the digital world more than ten years ago. These unwitting victims ranged from the just plain odd, like the hippy yoga studio I visited once on a whim, to the professionally inappropriate, like the top personnel at organisations where I used to be just a lowly work experience student, to the toecurlingly embarrassing like an ex-boyfriend….and his mum.

By clicking ‘yes’ to importing and inviting my contacts, I had given LinkedIn permission to delve not only into my current Gmail account but right across all my other online accounts and my desktop in order to send out invitations to every email address it could find, at lightning speed, before I had a chance to review them. 642 in all.

To make it worse, I then discovered that to prevent LinkedIn from spamming these contacts with constant reminders to connect to a virtual stranger, simply bulk deleting these invitations wasn’t enough. Instead I had to click ‘withdraw’ on every single invitation. One by one. (That’s one Sunday evening that I’ll never get back!)

What makes such a situation even trickier is that by allowing social networks access to all of your contacts, you’re also giving them the green light to make connection recommendations for all of those people too. This could be disastrous for those working in fields where broadcasting your professional or personal connections is highly inappropriate, such as journalists with confidential sources, or health professionals and patients, or those working on projects that are yet to be launched publicly.

And finally, there’s the moral and privacy aspect to consider. Why should I have the right to allow a third party website to store someone else’s email address and to start interacting with that person without first getting permission from that individual? In the worst case scenario, is it my fault if that person’s address gets hacked or spammed as a result?

I hope this tale doesn’t detract attention from the wealth of benefits LinkedIn and other similar sites offer because I still consider them to be a fantastic way to network within your industry, to connect with people wherever they are in the world and to discover training and career opportunities that may otherwise have passed you by.

But what I’ve learnt from this experience is that whenever you are asked to upload or import your contacts by any website, no matter how innocent or helpful the request appears, you need to do your homework to understand exactly what you are permitting that site to do with those addresses and over what timeframe. Yes, it’s tedious, but it’s always a good idea to read the organisation’s FAQs and privacy policy first before clicking ‘yes’ to any request that involves personal data.

And if you’re still in any doubt, then the best approach is to make a cup of tea and send your invitations the old fashioned way, one by one.

Hughes PR is a communications and public relations consultancy in Adelaide with proven and extensive experience in publicity and media relations, issues management, crisis management, digital and social media, community engagement, event management, media training, publications and strategic problem solving. Find out more.

Tags: ABI, adelaide, communications, community engagement, crisis management, digital media, event management, Facebook, friend finder tools, Hughes PR, issues management, LinkedIn, media relations, media training, pubilc relations, public relations consultancy, publicity, social media

Trials and tribulations in search for a name

Last week we were musing about how choosing a business name has changed in many ways since the rise of digital media. While many years ago you might decide on “AAA Removals” or “Aardvark Consulting” to ensure you were right up the front of the telephone directory, these days a whole new set of rules are in place to make sure you’re visible to your client base.

This article originally appeared in The Advertiser on 6 December 2011.

Trials and tribulations in search for a name

Finding a new company name is getting increasingly complicated with the need for multiple checks through websites and social media.

The search is getting so complex that digital agency Fusion director Gavin Klose says it is virtually impossible to find a short, four-letter name that has a website domain still available.

“Unless you have a really bizarre four-letter acronym it won’t be available,” Mr Klose said.

“Basically, every single name in the dictionary is taken, common names have been either taken or parked by name squatters who will charge you a huge amount to buy the domain name from them.”

Mr Klose, whose business works with companies on branding and names, says clients now need to first discover if a potential name is available by trademark and website domain.

Next, they should ensure the name is easy to find in a Google search or if its spelling is easy for potential customers to find so that they don’t end up inadvertently finding a competitor’s site instead.

“We are working with a web hosting company to find a name at the moment, it’s a very, very saturated marketplace and almost every single name we come up with is gone and not just that, gone to a hosting company,” he said.

“We were lucky that back in ’95 we registered Fusion as a name, if you tried to do that now it would be impossible.”

And once you have a name, Mr Klose suggests you “vigorously defend it” – Fusion has found two businesses to date using its name.

He also suggests incorporating social media links to the company website.

Kate Potter at Hughes PR emphasised choosing a unique name – but ensuring it was spelt like it sounded.

“Think about how it sounds out loud, think about whether it uses numerals or hyphens or full stops,” Ms Potter said. “If you have a radio ad and you have to explain in great detail how someone can find you online then you’ve used up half your spend just explaining your web address rather than communicating your other messages.”

Ms Potter said once a name was secured, its identity could be confused.

Triplezero web design company, for example, chose its name partly because www.triplezero.com.au was available.

Since then, the Government has established www.triplezero.gov.au – explaining emergency calling.

Hughes PR is a communications and public relations consultancy in Adelaide with proven and extensive experience in publicity and media relations, issues management, crisis management, digital and social media, community engagement, event management, media training, publications and strategic problem solving. Find out more.

Tags: adelaide, communications, community engagement, crisis management, digital media, domain name, event management, Google, Hughes PR, issues management, Kate Potter, media relations, PR, public relations, public relations consultancy, publicity, social media, website domain

To QR or not to QR?

QR Code

Kate Potter writes…

QR codes – abbreviated from Quick Response codes – are a type of barcode that started out as an invention for manufacturing tracking, but like any good invention soon found other uses.

These days, QR codes are found in a whole range of places ready to be “read” by you and me – using our smartphones. By downloading a QR code reader application for your iPhone, Blackberry, Android or other smartphone, you can read QR codes and “unlock” their content.

By “reading” a QR code on your phone, the data within the QR code then prompts the phone to take an action – be it go to a website, play a video, share a message on social media websites, draft an SMS message or even receive payments and donations directly through the QR.

You might have seen QR codes on billboards, promotional materials, coffee cups, wine bottles, posters or even as temporary tattoos!

Adelaide Festival 2012 poster uses a QR code in the bottom right hand corner of the design

There’s some debate about the effectiveness of QR codes. Firstly, QR codes are really only accessible to the population that uses smartphones. While this is a legitimate concern, it’s worth considering not only the percentage of the population using smartphones, but the percentage of your target market using smartphones. Statistics vary of course, but earlier this year Telstra predicted that smartphone ownership will reach 60 percent by year-end.

I was surprised recently to hear someone denounce QR codes because they didn’t understand why someone would want to be exposed to more advertising. But what this generalisation dismisses is situations where you really want to find out more information, or engage further with the creator of the communication. Some examples:

• A poster for a music festival has a QR code, which you can scan to be taken immediately to a timetable of the musical acts
• A wine bottle has a QR code which you can scan to be taken immediately to tasting notes, vintage report and technical specifications
• A billboard for a well-known charity campaign allows you to scan a QR code to donate immediately, transferring money to the charity’s PayPal account with their mobile phones

All of the uses of the QR code can also be tracked, allowing you to analyse exactly how successful your communication has been.

So, should QR codes be used for communications and marketing campaigns? I believe they are an effective and easy way to give your target audience more information, but like anything they are not a “one size fits all” solution. I wouldn’t put a QR code on a wine bottle that was intended to be cellared for 10 years – you never know what technology will replace the QR code and it may be a passing trend!

But in an age where people are bombarded by hundreds of messages a day from advertisers and organisations seeking publicity, QR codes can be effective when you’re asking consumers for a call to action (such as recruitment, petitions and competitions). The consumer can take that step on the spot while the idea is still fresh in their mind.

When creating a QR code, make sure you use a tool that allows you to change the destination of the scan such as http://uqr.me/. This will ensure your campaign is flexible.

Give them a try – if you have a smartphone, download a QR reader and next time you see a QR code, scan it to see where it takes you. You may discover some unique and innovative marketing using this technology.

UNICEF appeal using QR code

Hughes PR is a communications and public relations consultancy in Adelaide with proven and extensive experience in publicity and media relations, issues management, crisis management, digital and social media, community engagement, event management, media training, publications and strategic problem solving. Find out more.

Tags: adelaide, advertising, communications, community engagement, crisis management, digital media, event management, Hughes PR, issues management, Kate Potter, marketing, media, media relations, media training, PR, public relations, public relations consultancy, publicity, QR code, QR codes, smartphones, social media