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It seems only yes­ter­day that I wrote my last post on QR Codes, but just checked and it was last Novem­ber and my god has a lot hap­pened! Maybe, just maybe, they’re catch­ing on.

Despite encour­ag­ing signs in 2010, there were many who just believed that QR Codes, or mobile bar codes, were purely an interim tech­nol­ogy wait­ing for the newer, funkier tech­nolo­gies such as NFC and aug­mented real­ity to get their act together and take over. But, as is the way, this hasn’t hap­pened yet. Sure, things have pro­gressed, but they still do not yet offer com­pelling rea­sons for mobile manufacturers/networks to make the invest­ment to uni­ver­sally include them. This is due to, amongst other things, some inter­op­er­abil­ity issues between Wik­i­tude and Layar tech­nol­ogy, the debate over user inter­faces and the pros and cons of real-time ver­sus cached data.

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I was speak­ing at a B2B mar­ket­ing event the other day about mobile. For many of us it’s a very hot topic. What amazed me at the event, how­ever, was how few peo­ple in the room are actively con­sid­er­ing mobile mar­ket­ing for their organ­i­sa­tions. And, more impor­tantly, how mobile could form an inte­gral part of their cus­tomer engage­ment strat­egy. For me the biggest prob­lem seems to be a per­cep­tion gap between what mar­keters think and the actual mobile usage amongst their B2B tar­get audi­ences.

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I was at a WPP Dig­i­tal Day last month and one of the pre­sen­ters was King Yiu Chu from Layar. He took us through some great exam­ples of Aug­mented Real­ity and how it can be applied to our mar­ket­ing efforts.

One case study was the Unin­vited DIY Exhi­bi­tion at MoMA New York, where vis­i­tors to the art gallery were able to see a num­ber of addi­tional “unof­fi­cial” exhibits through their iPhone and Android hand­sets. A nice way of blur­ring the lines between phys­i­cal and vir­tual environments.

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With the B2B mar­ket­ing crowd get­ting increas­ingly excited about All Things Mobile, we’ve been ask­ing our­selves what we should be doing about our online con­tent, to make it acces­si­ble through mul­ti­ple devices, par­tic­u­larly our blog.

I thought it was high time we took action, so I had a look at our ana­lyt­ics to find out exactly which types of mobile devices were used to access our site, what per­cent­age of our over­all traf­fic they rep­re­sented, and what the growth rates were.

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2011 may very well be the year of mobile for mar­keters. A num­ber of fac­tors are com­bin­ing to make mobile as key and excit­ing a mar­ket­ing plat­form as online was in the early 2000’s.

Crit­i­cal mass

Dri­ving the rev­o­lu­tion is the fact that smart­phone pen­e­tra­tion has now reached crit­i­cal mass. Accord­ing to Comscore’s State of Mobile report pub­lished in June, 1 in 4 Euro­peans already have a smart­phone, so beyond SMS and pho­tos, web access and apps are now becom­ing key uses for  mobiles.

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For those lucky enough to escape the grey monot­ony of Lon­don last week (I was not so lucky) and escape to Barcelona for the Mobile World Con­gress, they were in for a rare treat. In recent years the world’s largest mobile event has descended into a rather dreary almost bor­ing litany of the same ol’ same ol’. This year appears to have been any­thing but…

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Chris­tine Her­ron at christine.net has a nice round up of the top 10 mobile mar­ket­ing cam­paigns as pre­sented at the recent Mobile Mar­ket­ing Forum. She also out­lines the key fac­tors for a suc­cess­ful cam­paign. Worth a read.
Mobile mar­ket­ing is still in its rel­a­tive infancy. It’ll be inter­est­ing to see how con­sumers react over time to the dif­fer­ent options on offer. The more tra­di­tional text-to-win approaches are rel­a­tively safe, it’s the consumer’s choice after all. But when we get into areas such as blue­jack­ing and friend-call-a-friend tech­niques, accep­tance will vary wildly from coun­try to coun­try as dif­fer­ent cul­tures view pri­vacy in very dif­fer­ent ways.

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