The daily deluge of digital information and marketing is getting increasingly hard to manage.
We get junk mail in our mailboxes at home and work, telemarketers calling us on the phone and spam via email. The advent of social media has added to that inflow of time-wasting "digital junk." Here are a few ways we can avoid adding to the digital landfill.
Reduce social media noise
Stop sending automated "DMs" (direct messages) on Twitter. I get so many of these each day, I have stopped reading DMs. Most seem to be malicious links anyway. If you want to engage people on Twitter, read their profiles and posts and mention them or "RT" (retweet) some useful or interesting content.
Automated messages on Face-book are even more annoying because they're hard to ignore. They can be generated to show up in your "messages" tab. You can try to "leave the conversation," but then each person who leaves the conversation generates another message notification that "so-and-so left the conversation" to everyone on the list. I had 300 of these from one single message. Everyone on the list was outraged, but no one seemed to be able to find a way to stop them. I went to the message and clicked on the "action" button and chose the last option "move to other." I then went to my privacy settings and changed my default to allow only "Friends" rather than "Everyone" to send me Facebook messages. I will report back whether these do the trick.
Use QR codes creatively
Quick Response codes are everywhere. They are the square black and white, two-dimensional bar codes you see on everything from magazine ads to cereal boxes to labels on your bananas. QR codes have been around for many years and were first developed in Japan to track car parts but were made popular in the past few years with QR code scanners that are available on smartphones. The problem is that everyone jumped on the bandwagon. QR codes are one of the most over-used and misused tools by marketers today. Many companies created QR codes that essentially were a link to their website. Some put QR codes in emails or websites, which is fine for people who scan their computer screens but makes it impossible for those who view it on their mobile device to scan (the camera used to scan the QR code is on the flip side of the mobile device screen).
The challenge for marketers is to come up with something more inventive. Think about the customers who scan the QR code. What content would make it interesting or of value to them and not waste their time?
The coffee shop down the street has a QR code on its receipts; when you scan it, you get points to redeem for a free coffee after 10 purchases. This is a new take on the loyalty card. I like it.
New York's BBDO ad agency created a campaign for Guinness by developing a beer glass wrapped in a QR code. Scan the code and the glass checks you in to Foursquare, tweets for you or updates your Facebook status. You need to use Guinness or a very dark beer to read the code (a light-coloured beer won't do it). Now that's marketing!
