Five Uses of QR Codes That Don’t Completely Suck

Mark my words. QR Codes will be the MySpace of 2012.¹

QR Codes, for the uninitiated, look like that strange dot thing on the right. When you scan it with an app on your mobile phone, it will show you some text or send you to a web site. (Leading me to wonder why the company didn’t just use that space to print the URL of their web site!) My favourite QR screw-up was the company who used QR Codes on their billboards that were displayed in the New York subway system. Underground. Where their phone couldn’t pull up the QR Code’s information. Awesome.

QR Codes do seem to be this year’s shiny object, though — even Facebook is playing around with them — and at many of my digital marketing workshops, I’m asked what I think of them. So while most implementations of QR Codes are a waste of space, there are some uses of these things which have impressed me.

The T-Shirt Twitter Search

At this year’s Northern Voice (Vancouver-based blogger conference), the back of conference t-shirts had a QR Code on them, dead centre in the middle of the sponsor logos. Sitting in the audience with lots of people in front of you, it was easy to scan the code surreptitiously. The URL, cleverly, went to a live Twitter search with references to the event. Sure, something like bit.ly/nv2011search might have worked just as well, but given the audience’s makeup (a lot of nerds and lots of smartphones), this was a smart call.

Tracking Food

Buying local is a well-established trend in the produce retail business, and the growing number of farmers’ markets shows that. In Japan, some supermarkets have already started to use QR codes on the label of fresh produce. Shoppers snap a picture of the head of lettuce’s code, for instance, and then is shown sent to a site with all the supplier’s details. An example of the label is to the right.

Connecting With Conference Attendees

Okay, I’ll admit this has the possibility of being a little creepy. (“Excuse me, may I scan your chest?”) But having a QR code on your nametag might be a quick way to add connections to your LinkedIn account. (That said, adding people on LinkedIn you’ve never actually worked with isn’t a great idea. My LinkedIn B2B workshop has more on this.) Remember that most QR Code apps will store a history of your scans, so you can end up with a healthy list of Twitter accounts, LinkedIn profiles, web pages, and so on. That said, Bump is a way, way cooler option.

Selling Houses

It’s been a while since I saw the old-fashioned brochures stapled to a realtor’s sign outside a house.² But I’ve seen more and more QR Codes printed on those signs. Scanning the codes will send you to a detailed web page about the property — this makes more sense than relying on realtor’s domain name to stick in someone’s brain. Once scanned, the URL of the property also stays in the app’s history, letting the potential home buyer get back to the page easily.

Promotions to the Tech Elite

Unless you live in Japan, chances are you’re not going to have a QR Reader app on your smartphone unless you’re an early tech adopting nerd. And that group is probably the only that’ll scan a “blind code” — a QR Code that’s printed by itself with no other explanatory notes. Sadly, if I saw a code just up on a building, like the one to the right, with no explanation as to where the code would send me, I would probably scan it. I can also pretty much guaranteed I’d be disappointed with the destination. The end result has to be interesting as well, remember, or people just won’t bother scanning any more.

1. Don’t mark those words too carefully; I once infamously debated Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake on CBC Radio with the position that blogs were just a fad and would blow over. Ahem. [↩]
2. I guess they’re getting ripped off for the underground paper market?… [↩]