As a test, whip out your Smartphone and fire up your favorite Reader App, go here:  http://on.fb.me/hpbz5a (this is public link to a Photo Album on the Sorrento Mesa Facebook Page containing some test codes) and scan them and see what happens. What we found is that depending on your reader application, some will work, some won’t, some work all the time, and some don’t.

QR codes have a basic built in error correction function in their format so that if part of the pixels are blocked, the code will still render the destination URL. But if you exceed that error correction threshold, the code will not resolve to the destination site and the user will experience a failed scan. What’s interesting about all of this is that not all reader apps perform with the same success rate. Before I share what we’ve seen I want to state that this was a purely unscientific test and I make no claims about the viability or lack thereof of those apps mentioned, but clearly there were some trends that we discovered.

I asked some friends in my industry, all owners of other printing companies around the country to help me with the testing. Blackberry, Droids (various manufacturers) and iPhones were the three phones used and the apps listed were I-Nigma, NeoReader, ScanLife, QuickMark, Barcode Scanner, Optiscan, Beetag and Blackberry Messenger. Some worked, some didn’t. I don’t want to go into too much detail, but one thing that we discovered was that I-Nigma worked almost every time for all three of these test QR codes. Again, all of these reader apps will work for a Plain-Jane Black & White QR Code, its when we dress them up and put stress on the reader app to perform is where we see a major difference in the results.

The big takeaway for us with all of this is that if you decide to get creative with your QR codes, test, test and re-test. Use various apps and phones in combination to see what happens when scanned. The most important thing about QR Codes is that they work. Going forward we’ll be suggesting that people use I-Nigma as their reader app because of the success we witnessed in this informal test. You can download it here: http://www.i-nigma.com/Downloadi-nigmaReader.html .

“Customer relationship management (CRM) is a widely-implemented strategy for managing a company’s interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities, but also those for marketing, customer service, and technical support.”

There’s been an entire universe of content written about social media. What it is, how to use it, what to do, what not to do, but there hasn’t been much said about how social media and CRM can work together. In some ways social media on its own can function as a CRM tool. A Facebook business page serves as an excellent example of how we can touch our clients and they can respond in a way that builds community.  Social media has now brought us the ability to do things in real time that CRM never quite has. Yet, the strength of CRM lies in the data. Whether your CRM tool is software that sits on your servers or in the cloud, social media at this time can’t match the width, breadth and detail of business intelligence that can be contained within CRM software.

But imagine for a moment if the two could be brought together to work as one powerful tool. Could this be defined as a killer app? I think yes. At Sorrento Mesa Printing we use Goldmine http://www.frontrange.com/software/crm/goldmine for our CRM software and we use it to keep track of clients and prospects in the sales and marketing efforts that we undertake. The power of Goldmine (or any CRM) is that all sales specific conversations, emails, phone calls, letters and other related activity is compiled and accessible in one place. And since it sits on our network, accessible by others in our organization as well.

I picked up a tip last year from Chad Smith’s Goldmine blog: http://www.thegoldmineblog.com which has allowed me to integrate both CRM and social media into what may be defined as a sales and marketing killer app. One of the features of Goldmine is that it has a tab (GoldMine has a tabbed window interface allowing various functions to be seen with a few clicks) called GM+View which opens a window that is script driven and can give various views. I picked up a number of scripts from Chad’s blog one of them being a script that gives a view of the prospect’s LinkedIn profile, another a view of the prospect’s company on Google Maps – all of this driven by the data in the contact profile. Imagine the ability to search for a prospect listed in your CRM and in an instant have at your fingertips their LinkedIn profile and a map and directions to their company and various other useful tools. That capability exists and can be an incredible tool in your quest to compress time and find new clients and companies to do business with.

There is nothing fancy or proprietary about any of this. But it is an illustration of how these tools are all around us, we just have to be creative and assemble them in a way that helps us reach our goals. Social media is a powerful tool that can also be fun and very helpful in the propagation of your company’s brand and conversation with your clients, but with the addition of CRM as a force multiplier we may just have a killer app at hand.

Social media (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) gives us a new ability to instantly connect and communicate. It give us a reach – local, national and international to instantly keep up, know what’s going on, stay in the loop. Before social media it was email, before email it was the phone and the letter via USPO. You could even take it back to carrier pigeons and smoke signals if you want yet with all these new methods of communication one essential piece is missing and its big, the human connection, face time.

Face time allows us to share, to laugh, to read the facial expressions of others punctuating what’s been said in a way that is not possible unless you are right there in the moment. Sitting around at the Billy Goat Grill in Chicago with other printer friends this week realizing this is the place where the SNL skit Cheezborger Cheezborger, you want double Cheezborger? (can you still see John Belushi?) was born just can’t punch through on Facebook. You have to be there.

What I find personally satisfying is meeting in person for the first time, those who I’ve established relationships with previously only online. It’s kind of like listening to a DJ or commercial voice talent on the radio for years and then finally seeing them or meeting them, and its never what you expect for the mind just fills in the blanks of what is missing right or wrong. Unfortunately social media now takes the visual surprise away, yet many wonderful undiscovered qualities of first contact still remain. Voice, height, size, a smile, a handshake, and instantly you feel like you’ve just met an old friend, that you’ve never met before. It is surreal. I filled in a lot of blanks these last couple of days and it was incredibly satisfying.

There is no replacement for face time, none. It’s the richest form of communication and also the most complex and the most wonderful. In today’s interconnected digital world it brings a reality that is impossible to replace. So I say get out there, see people. Take every opportunity whether it’s a national conference or a just meeting with a client to get some face time, you won’t regret it.

So putting aside all the legit emails and the list server traffic and the LinkedIn traffic in other words: All the email I sign up for, the rest is labeled SPAM/JUNK. And most of that SPAM is from people trying to either sell me stuff, or trying to get my attention so I’ll look at them so they can sell me stuff. In other words E-Mail Marketing. Here are the statistics and they are truly frightening:

For the month of June 2010

Total emails received: 31,290

Total emails  classified as JUNK: 25,750  92%

(This month, July so far its running at 94%)

Accuracy of Junk Filter: >99%

What this tells me is that A. I love Eudora, and B. 25,750 E-Mail marketing messages are not getting through. I’m not ever seeing them and they get dumped tens of thousands at a time into the trash. If you’ve given up on print media marketing and replaced it with email marketing, I’d say you have something to think about. For smc@sorrentomesa.com it’s game over, the spammers have won. I’ll have to eventually start with a new address. Has email marketing Jumped the Shark? I say yes.

I believe E-Mail still has its place but for an online marketing strategy I think social media is where it’s at. I also believe that social media combined with print media are the best bet these days for cutting through the clutter and getting your message read. Email marketing is cheap and it’s easy and you should still use it as part of your overall marketing strategy, but to rely heavily on it while excluding other methods for communicating your message you have to stop and ask yourself if it’s really working. Social Media takes more effort (and time, lots of time) and print media costs more money but in the end it’s results that count. If your marketing strategy is heavily dependent on email marketing, I hope sharing these stats will give you pause and hopefully make you consider all the alternatives as well.

Now I’m not a music critic so their music isn’t the  focus of this post. What I find fascinating is how they’re coming back.  They already have a well established brand and tons of fans, they just need to wake them up. And they’re doing it in a big way. At the heart of it is the Club Devo site where the story is told. They’ve got YouTube and Twitter and Facebook firing on all cylinders (I’m sure there’s got to be some print in this strategy somewhere) plus they took a page out of the old “give ‘em a sample and they’ll come back for more” book by streaming their new album over and over on Ustream. The 24 hour Cat Listening Party was a bunch of kitty’s hanging out on a blue energy dome cat perch with all DEVO all the time playing in the background. There were people messing with the kitties (strings and lasers and such) to keep the action going because if you’ve owned cats, you know they’re not a motivated bunch. It was brilliant. I found myself listening to DEVO for part of the day and occasionally bringing up the kitty tab in my browser to see the latest.

Its weird but its a brilliant well executed marketing strategy. Don’t be surprised if you find DEVO racing up the charts very soon as this stuff continues to go viral and just in time to kick off their tour which begins Saturday June 19th in Las Vegas. A well known brand has been repackaged and served up for a whole new generation. Its a great illustration of the power of social media.

Recently I have seen change within the print community as many are now branching out and embracing social media as are most in the business world. The adoption rate is picking up as more and more of my printer friends are establishing Facebook Fan (or is it now Like?) pages and some of them are even beginning to tweet. I have a printer friend on the east coast who has turned into a powerhouse blogger. Every week she has something new to say. I only wish I could be more consistent with this blog. This is all very encouraging because social media takes time to understand and develop. The sooner you get started the sooner you are on the path to success with these new tools.

Most of my social media efforts has been centered around my business, because as most of my small business colleagues know:
You are your business and your business is you.

Here is my lineup of non-print media where you will find this printer:

• http://www.sorrentomesa.com

• http://facebook.com/sorrentomesa

• http://www.linkedin.com/in/sorrentomesa

• http://twitter.com/sorrentomesa

• http://sorrentomesablog.com

Combined with web, mobile and social media there are many new tools in print media that are available that can make your print more effective, more powerful and elicit a much higher response rate. I’ll leave those discussions to another post.

2009 has also brought its share of unwanted change as well. This has made itself apparent after spending the last few months calling clients to update contact information and catch up with those I’ve not spoken with for a while. Many of my client contacts are no longer there and it’s been quite a revelation. Some have been fortunate to find other opportunities, others are still searching. So much change in such a short period of time. The pundits say we’ll be looking at these employment conditions to stay with us for awhile. What is different during this downturn though is previously I might have lost contact with some of these clients, now through social media I’ve still been able to stay in touch and even been able to help by making introductions though my LinkedIn network.

So, even though 2009 has been the year of change there are things you can do to adapt and help others adapt as well. Take a few moments and think about what you can do. Even the smallest gesture can have a big impact. I would welcome your thoughts and ideas.

Story: http://tinyurl.com/l74j68

Video: http://tinyurl.com/knxyvm

As I write this, the video which was posted on July 6th a mere 13 days ago is rapidly approaching 3.5 MILLION views and has a rating of 5 stars with almost 25,000 people giving their thumbs up. Obviously Dave hit a nerve.  It could have been any airport and any airline, but in the musical chairs of airline travel when the music stopped it was United in Chicago and the indifference of the employees from that day until a year later that sparked the will and creativity of what we now know as the story (and video) of United Breaks Guitars.

So for those of us in business, what can we learn at United’s expense?

We now live in a new connected world where social media and one individual can bring a story of ultimate customer indifference to many, and in the process reverse the efforts of millions of dollars of brand promotion and positioning.

We also see that this could all have been avoided if someone somewhere in the United organization would have just stepped forward and taken some responsibility for making things right.  It would have been so easy to do.

United Breaks Guitars is a wake up call to big corporate America and small business America and everyone in between that the customer ultimately is the boss. The customer writes your paycheck and in the end the customer can vote with their feet and in this case probably influence a lot of other feet as well. Dave says that he intends to make two more videos to complete a trilogy, and then we all get to vote for the best. I’m looking forward to the next installment and in the meantime I hope we can all learn a lesson or two from the story of United Breaks Guitars.

Consider the advantages of print:

It’s credible.

Things that appear in print usually carry more weight with the reader.

It’s portable.

You can read the message without being near a monitor or a phone.

It’s convenient.

You can choose when and where you read the message, on your timetable.

It’s easily archived.

Print Media doesn’t need backups or protection against drive crashes.

It’s fun.

Try making a wicked paper airplane out of a web page.

Your print media should be used to inform, and also to drive readers to your website, where they can learn more about you, and you about them.

Work closely with your printer, he or she can help you in this process. Printers know how to increase the effectiveness of your print projects so you can spend wisely for the best results. Print media is a powerfully persuasive tool.

Use it.

For more specific information about the effectiveness of print media, I would invite you to visit  www.printinthemix.com

“I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”

I think this is one of the keys to success in anything one does. Anticipate what is to come, and position yourself for the best outcome. Truly wise words.

As a salesperson, a small business owner, one who has worked in the scientific community, a resident of a beautiful city in the deep south of California, husband, father, brother, UCSD Alumnus and someone who is highly engaged in making things go, I hope to bring value with my words and comments about what I see. For those that can relate, I have a day to day reality check that drives my actions  called making payroll. Those of us who live with this responsibility tend to see things a little differently than most, and I hope to bring that perspective to the mix as well.

Blogging is new for me, although I participate quite frequently on an assortment of email listserves and am no stranger to speaking my mind.

I have a presence on LinkedIn:  http://www.linkedin.com/in/sorrentomesa

Twitter:  http://twitter.com/sorrentomesa

and Facebook. I would encourage those who read my blog to leave comments and share your thoughts as well. This looks like it could be fun.