This Christmas the DSA Media Network will proudly make donations on behalf of each team member to their various charities of choice. These include: Nabs, Salvation Army, Make a Wish Foundation, Basics for Babies, BC Children’s Hospital, BC SPCA and Hope International.
From all of your friends at DSA, we wish you a safe and happy holiday season!
I saw three interesting applications of the QR code this week. The first one was on a large sign for a bank at a busy Skytrain station, listing all the branches in the area on a map, and providing a QR for each. The second was a QR prominently displayed over a realtor’s sign on a neighbour’s lawn. The third was the strangest of all, but I’ll touch on it in a bit.
I’d bet they each went to an appropriate spot, like a map or a listings webpage. But that’s just a guess, because, let’s be honest, who wants to stop in a busy crowd or pull over to carefully aim their focus-challenged phone camera at a sign? And that’s just one of the obstacles with the QR code.
Not too long ago, we decided to put QRs on the back of our business cards, so that, when scanned, our contact info could be quickly added to a user’s address book. Pretty cool idea, right? But in reality, the feedback was mixed. Some Blackberrys didn’t have powerful enough cameras to capture the code, some applications just dumped the info into a note app or to the pasteboard, and a few actually loaded it as a v-card like we wanted.
That’s the challenge. You need to get someone who:
And even if you get 1, 2, and 3, you then need to provide a meaningful and consistent experience. I doubt many people will interact with a realtor’s sign, but if I was looking for real estate in a print magazine and saw a QR code that went right to the MLS listing, I’d check it out.
The third use of the QR code that really made me shake my head, though, was a company whose online banner ads included a tiny QR code. Click through rates are already low enough, but expecting someone to pull out their phone and move their experience from computer to mobile based on an ad seems like a stretch. Even if it’s for a mobile-specific product, that needs to be some strong incentive.
Experts seem to be split about whether the QR is in for the long haul or racing against other technologies to take a hold of the general public. In September 2011, about 18% of smart phone subscribers in Canada used their devices to scan a QR code according to comScore. As marketers and the public begin to understand it more, and devices catch up, adoption rates should continue to rise.
What would put it over the top? I’d say the QR needs a killer app, and not one you can download. Native support in iPhone and Android with simplistic integration right from inside the camera. If Apple put that in the next version of iOS, I think we’d see it really take off.
Do you “excel” at coordinating people, projects and numbers?
The DSA Media Network is western Canada’s largest independent media planning and buying company and we’re looking for full time Media Buyers and Coordinators to join our Langley and Calgary teams.
We are seeking individuals that are detail and people oriented, and who possess media knowledge and superior project management abilities.
The successful candidates will participate in the day-to-day media efforts of accounts including research, planning, buying, managing budget control reports and posting all facets of media campaigns that we place on behalf of our clients. Having experience with digital media is a strong asset.
This position is available immediately and we are reviewing resumes now.
Salary will be commensurate with experience.
If you’re interested, send your resume to general@dsamedia.ca.
I’ve had a couple weeks now to dive in and play with Google Plus, and, to echo what others have said, unlike Google Buzz and Google Wave, this feels like the real deal. G+ takes the best features of Facebook and Twitter, adds in some better ones, and cuts bait with some of the worst.
Why G+ promises to be great can be summarized in one word: flexibility. You can use it however you want to.
How about a Facebook replacement to interact with friends and colleagues, but with the added privacy and broadcast control of Circles? Definitely. How many times have you had to censor your comments or photos on Facebook because of concerns over who might see them? With Circles, your contacts are grouped and you can interact with them in different ways.
How about an alternative to Twitter to connect with celebrities, other professionals, and get news as it breaks? Once the adoption rate is there, yes. Many savvy Twitter stars are already on G+, and it’s easy to connect with them. And following intelligent discussion on Twitter can be cumbersome and restrictive because of the format and 140 characters limitation. Consider this public G+ thread started by Social Media expert Paul Holmes to see how much cleaner G+ can handle an idea exchange about, of course, G+.
How about a business interaction and project management tool utilizing Huddle discussion threads and Hangouts for video conferencing? In our office, we use a mish mash of Basecamp for project management and collaboration, Skype for video, and various other messaging platforms and office tools. Coupled with Google Documents and Calendar, Google wraps all those functions into one seamless package.
So what now? Well, we wait for everyone to jump on board the G+ train, because, as Paul points out in his thread, until the critical mass is there, all this promise won’t be fully realized.
I’m off to send some more invites.
A rather dubious report has been circling the internet today, and since it’s been picked up by several large news providers, I thought it merited commenting on.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/digitaltrends/20110613/tc_digitaltrends/facebooktrafficplummetsintheus
Facebook is not failing in Canada, despite what these misleading stats would have you believe.
The articles use stats without enough context and leave out key information to sensationalize a story. Aside from general seasonal fluctuations that have been commented on by others already, the numbers they are using are misleading or flat out wrong.
The numbers being quoted are from Facebook’s self-serve advertising interface, and represent total active users within the last 30 days; it is not a accurate list of membership. These numbers are estimate at best, as when you apply targeting parameters such as geographic areas, the reach in a given area will often exceed the actual population. This number represents all active profiles, included multiple profiles, and doesn’t differentiate between inactive users and deleted profiles.
In Canada, ComScore is the primary measurement tool for measuring online activity and it has reported growth in Facebook’s reach in Canada every single month since May 2009 (as far back as I have info on file). Their numbers actually exceed Facebook’s profile count, as they estimated a reach of 21.1 million users in May (84% of the estimated online population). The extra traffic would be non-registered users that still end up viewing Facebook pages (fan pages, pictures linked from other sites etc.)
The most glaring problem I have with this article is that they are using a slow down in new user growth as an indicator that the site is losing steam. As mentioned, Facebook already reaches 84% of Canadians, growth has to slow as a market reaches total saturation. Countries with high penetration simply don’t have any population left to add to the numbers. Look at Reddit.com in comparison: in Canada the estimate reach of Reddit increased by over 450% since March 2010 (noting that the traffic does swing wildly month to month), in the same period Facebook grew by only about 4%. Yet Facebook’s actual number increase was 937,000, compared to reddit’s increase of 345,000. Yes, Facebook’s percentage growth is small, but the actual increase in traffic is huge.
There are also glaring omissions from the source article when reported by newspapers:
“Bugs in the Facebook advertising tool that we draw this information from, seasonal changes like college graduations, and other short-term factors, can influence numbers month to month and obscure what’s really happening.”
…and this bit, covered by the LA Times, but ignored by Yahoo:
“Still, by the time Facebook reaches around 50% of the total population in a given country (plus or minus, depending on internet access rates in that country), growth generally slows to a halt, as we’ve noted before.”
That million user drop in Canada?
“Canada also fell significantly, by 1.52 million down to 16.6 million, although it has been fluctuating around that number for the past year.”
Facebook is an easy target and has generated a lot of backlash on privacy and security issues in the past; news sources know it makes a great headline. However, these articles are entirely based on a single report based on numbers generated by a self-serve advertising platform that is known to be a broad estimate at best. The source article admits these numbers are prone to fluctuation and even opens their article with the following quote, omitted by the newspapers:
“As we note below, we’ll need to wait to see what the long-term trends really are before knowing if Facebook is continuing to grow in the US and other countries.”
That omission speaks volumes about the quality of this content.
As a parting item, the poster of the original report has a follow up article today: http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/06/13/available-data-shows-facebook-user-numbers-growing-quickly-or-slowly-or-falling/ This article indicates that other reporting source cannot corroborate the initial findings, and ComScore number in the US match the trends I’ve mentioned for Canada.
There is a good chance that the Facebook contest you’ve recently entered, started or were thinking about running may be in violation of Facebook’s terms. You know the ones. “Like” this photo and be entered in our contest to win a free weekend stay with Charlie Sheen.
They are a great way to engage an audience as the trickledown effect of each “Like” weaves through the social network and your brand appears in new streams. And they were a particularly strong solution for small businesses operating on small budgets, as the only cost was time and whatever the prize was, most often a service or small product.
But unless the business is using a third party application, such as Wildfire or Strutta, they risk the potential of their page being taken down by the Zuckerberg army. Simply put, Facebook is separating themselves from any liability of having their service associated with the contest. That means entering through Facebook and even contacting winners through the messaging system. This policy change actually goes back to 2009, with some tweaks in 2010, but it’s been widely ignored or missed altogether.
Of course, with third party applications come additional costs. Depending on the goal, another solution for many budgets may be a Facebook ad campaign. Facebook’s click through rates are typically outperformed by other media, but there can be good branding value in the high number of impressions that are served on a cost per click campaign. They also bring some great targeting capabilities.
For more details on Facebook promotions, have a look at Mari Smith’s excellent post on the topic.