Advertising — Rocketship To Planet Jeff

QR Codes in the wild in Atlanta and Buckhead, GA.

June 13, 2011 By Jeff Small 1 Comment

In town this week for “An Event Apart” I started noticing QR codes as soon as I got off the plane Sunday morning. A lot of the airport duratrans had them and I was particularly drawn to the destination ads, with the ad for the Gulf Coast being the best example of a mobile landing page so far. Another interesting thing was how many of the codes were going to URL shorteners. I saw a lot of bit.ly urls and custom bit.ly urls for the landing pages. Only one that I remember went to a non-mobile page (Very Bad!) and another went directly to a video. I see a lot of articles mentioning taking users to videos as landing destinations, but I disagree wholeheartedly. You have to remember that not everyone has an unlimited data plan and I think just sending people straight to a video without allowing the user to choose to go to a video is not only rude, but bad practice. If I were paying for my data plan by the byte, I’d be irritated if you forced a meg or two on me without asking first. I think the workable option is to take users to a nice landing page with some copy, and perhaps a screen shot of the video that links to the video on a robust delivery platform like YouTube.

The best example so far though was GNC nutrition in the Lenox Mall. First off, they had a huge QR code in the window. We’re talking four feet across at least. I couldn’t miss it, and when I snapped it, I turned to walk away expecting some kind of landing page, but was pleasantly surprised that I was told to turn around and go back into the store to get a free coconut water. I could choose between three or four flavors. So naturally I turned right around, headed into the store and got my free coconut water (I chose peach, by the way)! Excellent little offer that got me into the store when I was actually walking the other way.

So here you go, a little gallery of my first day in Atlanta sort of casually walking around on a Sunday.

[View with PicLens]

Filed Under: Advertising Tagged With: Mobile, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Bad Examples, Mobile Best Practices, Mobile Landing Pages, QR Codes

You find your own rewards… sometimes without even looking.

February 11, 2011 By Jeff Small Leave a Comment

The last week has been really rewarding. It’s Friday and as I look back on the week, I realize events that were merely “to-do” items on my agenda turned out to be the highlights of my week. Not the place you expected to find yourself on a Friday afternoon, but certainly a place you’ll enjoy.

On Wednesday, I hosted a “lunch and learn” at work. I love my job and one of the best parts about it is all the great technology I’m constantly exposed to. An even better part of it is that I love sharing it within the context of actually showing people how it can make their lives easier, make their work easier, make their jobs easier, and basically help them realize that often lofty goal of technology, “to improve your life”. Too often, and I’m even guilty of it too, you think, “oh, this is just too much. There’s too much out there and I can’t ever keep up” and so I’m always on the lookout for ways that technology and software can facilitate making my day to day life a little easier. Once I find them, and I learn and use them, I become an evangelist of sorts and I’m always eager to share. Wednesday was one of those days. I sent an email out to everyone at work and basically said, “hey, I’ve discovered a bunch of great, useful tools that I’m finding myself using and getting a lot of value from and if you’re interested, I’d love to eat a sandwich in the front meeting room, get on the big screen, and share some of them because I think you’ll dig ‘em too.” I wasn’t sure who would show up (if anyone) but lo, and behold, I had a nice crowd! We spent the hour eating, sharing, talking, and I walked out of the lunch thinking, “wow, that was more awesome than I anticipated, and I think everyone got something great out of it!”

Then, this morning, I had a meeting scheduled to sit down with a room full of Realtors and show them how to use their CRM software to use some email templates we had created for them to more effectively market to their customers and prospects. I wasn’t sure, walking into the room, what to expect, and knowing that my audience wasn’t as “technical” (in other words, they weren’t database nerds who actually got excited about working in a robust CRM) as I was, I have to admit, I was a little nervous about the outcome. I don’t know what it was, either I love to hear myself talk (well, we all know that’s totally the case) or they were really in tune with what I was laying down, but we all really clicked as a room and it quickly turned into a really rewarding, collaborative meeting. Lots of energy, lots of enthusiasm, and again, I walked out of there thinking, “wow, that turned out way better than I had anticipated!”.

So it was, I had two rather non-eventful events planned on my schedule that I wasn’t expecting so much out of, turn out to be some of the best work moments of the week. I wasn’t programming. I wasn’t creating anything, or hitting a deadline, or managing a project. I was just sitting with some people, sharing solutions, engaging in some back and forth, and walking away feeling as if both sides got way more out of it than they thought they’d get going into it.

That’s some pretty rewarding work… cleverly disguised as “to-do” items on a calendar.

Filed Under: Advertising, Personal Tagged With: Happiness, leadership, learning, meetings, sharing

“Location Based Social Media” or, “Yeah, I beat that game…”

August 2, 2010 By Jeff Small 3 Comments

So I started using Foursquare a while back. I suppose I chose it over Gowalla because it seemed, at the time, like Foursquare had more going on. More people, more momentum, more fun. I gotta be honest too, I was really enjoying it.

Then my video game attention span kicked in.

Now it’s like Super Mario Galaxy 2. I played it. I liked it. I beat it. I sent it back to Gamefly.

Seems like that’s the problem with making “Social Media” and “Location Based Services” like a game, eventually you beat them and you move on, looking for the next thing to engage you. I can see how LBS (Location Based Services) are a perfectly logical blend of social media and cell phone portability. You have a smart GPS-enabled device right there in the palm of your hand, and it’s already been demonstrated ad nauseum that people want to share… a LOT. But at a certain point it feels like all those worlds collide, and not in a good way. Some time in the last couple of weeks I came to the simultaneous conclusion that, A) I was tired of “checking into” every place, and B) I wasn’t really enjoying the idea of letting everyone know where I was every minute of the day, and C) I squeezed about as much fun and enjoyment out of the “game” of Location Based Services that I could, and I was ready to move on.

Don’t get me wrong. I still think it’s “all about location”, but now, for me, it’s more about information. Fast, reliable, location-based information. I’m sure I’ll still get an urge to “check in” to someplace if I’m out of town, at a conference or something, but haven’t I checked into my gym and The Gap enough?

So where am I turning to more and more? Google Maps, that’s where. With the last series of updates to Google’s Android Maps app, I’ve noticed that they’re doing a great job of telling me where is the best place to get that certain item or service I’m looking for. Oh sure, there are social “check in” features and “share this with your friends” features that I’ll probably use when I’m really passionate about something, but more often than not, I just want to find the closest place with the best organic peanut butter… and I don’t really care if my friends know or not.