thinking: relating- celebrating :-)

Here is a glimpse into the future of online shopping from Korea. What is exciting and significant here is that customers using mobile phones are able to use QR codes to short cut straight to a shopping cart by scanning those codes directly off a poster.

We have seen some use of QR codes and mostly it has been trivial to date.

“A QR code (abbreviated from Quick Response code) is a type of matrix barcode (or two-dimensional code) designed to be read by smartphones. The code consists of black modules arranged in a square pattern on a white background. The information encoded may be text, a URL, or other data.”

For QR codes to be useful shoppers need to have access to a QR reader cable ecommerce shopping system, a smart phone and fast, inexpensive mobile data.

The display posters are close to lifesize photos of each of the products. I can see this is an exceptional idea for extending online shopping functionality to busy locations where a billboard space might be available.

In effect shoppers are able to browse the equivalent of a several metres wide screen image of key products without going near a computer. Although to be fair their smart phones do need to be able to read the qr codes off the posters.

We need to do some more research on exactly how to do this for online shopping sites but I suspect billboard owners will be extremely excited about this

My QR code is displayed at left and if you have a reader you can scan my contact details but just imagine I could also sell you an ecommerce report at the same time.

Now we’re talking business !

P.S We’ve been watching all of the coupon sites and while that seems like a good way to drive offline media traffic on to online channels not all deals work that well for vendors or the media channels.

Also the price of accessing the old media (TV for the most part) is still expensive and the unintended consequences of a huge rush of traffic to a website or physical store is not easy to manage or profit from. Getting repeat business is not easy to do if most of the shoppers are deal takers who just chase discounts.

“We’ve also heard consistently from certain categories of businesses (very popular ones I’m afraid) that daily deals are uneconomic for them, which does raise questions around the sustainability of “50% off” daily deals for these types of businesses.”

Yelp CEO says they are working on new developments to the daily deal type of business.

My money is on QR codes and this store concept from Korea is the future of online stores and no unsustainable 50% off foolish deals are needed to get more online business by heading down the QR path.

When my daughter was 3 she used to ask what I did for a job. She has a much better idea now but to keep things simple I used to say something like this.

“I talk with people, I take lots of notes. Then some web stuff.”

Fairly often now some of this takes place all at the same time. Live twitter streams from events are now part of the (new) media mix.  Services like Be in the Room can aggregate social media feeds and we can take questions from external observers via the use of hashtags.

Here is recent example (August 4th) from the Unitec Forum for the Future series on Auckland Super City debates. Look at earlier posts on theDomm website for more about that event and/ or follow on twitter @UnitecFTF At the UnitecFTF those who couldn’t be there asked questions via twitter.

This was the 6th forum event so far. More are planned. Noted business commentator and journalist Rod Oram is the chair for the event and Associate Professor & Head of Department Rob Davis deserves full credit for being the catalyst & firestarter on this project.

As this debate took place in a TV studio with lots of outside media present some of this was captured on video. I even got a rare chance to see myself at work because when you are on live streaming it all tends to be a bit of blur in the moment.

The super city changeover for Auckland is an important change and  it deserves better, smarter, more engaging media and new media engagement.

Well done Unitec cast and crew for making a difference.

At WordCampNZ I was planning to talk about what I do most of the time which is online marketing projects integrated with WordPress.

On the day I talked more about the logistics around WordCamp rather than the stats & case studies I had planned to do.

My business is focussed at the marketing end of the scale and so I use email tools especially Campaign Monitor and MailChimp plus various other social media plugins to make it as easy as possible for customers and partners to engage with each other.

Again not having enough time (or sleep) I mentioned these WordPress plugins in passing.

This is the partly the presentation that I had planned but on the day it seemed more important to go wider and talk about WordCampNZ future planning.

1. Google Analyticator is one of my favourite plugins as it gives a rolling 30 day view of GA on the WordPress dashboard. This saves going into the google account which not many of my customers want to do. The plugin has role settings and so that desktop widget can be rolled down to below admin and editors if that is what you want to do.
2. FB Like is Facebook like plugin that we use on WordcampNZ. I like it (sorry about the pun.) Much as I personally have mixed views about Facebook (privacy & commerce) there is no doubting the huge clout it has when someone that you know likes or comments on stuff we all care about. (see also my post from June 06 Trust & verify on trust cues.)
3. Backtype Connect is another plugin that is used extensively to feed in the twitter and other social streams into blogs. Part of the reason we use it is that it provides some twitter analytics which is a growing area of interest for many businesses. Have a look at these analytics for the post on Richard Hollingnum.The other reason I / we use Backtype is that some of the automattic people invested in it. (P.s you may need to setup a free account with Backtype if you can’t see the full set of stats)
4. In passing I also referred to VaultPress for backups and VideoPress for video hosting also very much worth checking them out.
5. WordPress Mobile Edition plugin from Alex King is one of my favourites. I don’t mind reading the instructions as there is a theme part and a plugin part. So this plugin needs a FTP whiz to do upload. Auto install won’t get the theme part in the right location.

The other point to remember with these kinds of lists is that plugin versions and WordPress versions are a moving target and do change.

This means that – as always there might be a particular combination of versions that may not work with your theme or other setup configuration.

Congrats to Bill Bennett for his piece on Writing for the web in 300 words one of my favourites and now I’ve just hit 482 so time to publish.