CoolCoyotes recently had developed a new website to highlight our change of focus from being seen as a web development firm to becoming  a full service, integrated, multi-channel marketing organization. As we moved along that evolutionary and organization change path we also decided to take advantage of some contemporary technologies which make it easier for people to learn more about us and to extend our brand.

One of those technologies is the use of “smart tags”. Our first pass at this “smart tag” technology was to adopt the use of Microsoft Tags for promotional materials and business cards. Our entre’ into Microsoft tags was eased by the cost to create the tags (free) and the ubiquitous availability of tag reading software for mobile devices.

Interestingly you can purpose tags for a variety of purposes including navigation to websites, downloading of contact information (.vcf files), navigation to videos (or any web accessible file) or simple text messages.

Using the http://tag.microsoft.com website we were able to establish a free account and then create a number of tag categories in order to classify our tags, e.g. staff contact tags, website tags, promotions or campaigns and so on. In addition to the ability to create and render tags, the site also allows you to track and monitor the activity against the tags. Thus you can determine how many scans have occurred with a period of time and approximately where the tags were scanned -- assuming the person scanning the tag has permitted the scanning app to be location aware.

So we recently created some cool new offset printed business cards for each of our employees which contain either a tag which, when scanned, downloads the staff member’s contact info or a link to our website.

Our next step will be to investigate the use of QRCodes.

What has your experience been with “smart tags”? Microsoft Tags or QRCodes?

 

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