QR code for Lawn With Gnomes

My obsession with QR Codes began a few months ago. Since my discovery of them I’ve spent countless hours reading blogs, use cases on wiki’s and creating unique ideas for social events.

Recently I convinced my boss to add QR Codes to the back of our paper fliers because I felt that was the best way we could test it out on the public with minimal cost to the company.

The idea:
Add a QR Code to the back of our fliers for each genre of concerts in the hopes we could drive traffic via mobile phones to our site.

Problems:
1. QR codes need to be bigger if they contain more information, we needed them to be small. The web address we were pointing to was http://www.granadatheater.com/ which comes up as pretty dense QR code.

2. Tracking, how were we going to track the traffic sent from the codes? For QR Codes at the moment there is no unified way to track them.

3. Education for the uninitiated. Realizing the general public has no clue what these things are and trying to teach them.

Solutions:
Making a QR code that was less dense was achieved by creating a shortened URL with http://j.mp . By making the URL contained within the QR code smaller via the j.mp URL we were able to solve problems 1 & 2 easily. Now we have easy to read codes and we can track their progress. Yes, you read it right, metrics on print media.

Now, onto education.
It’s hard to find good materials that already exist online to teach non-geeks about QR Codes. I did my little attempt below using a demonstration of me scanning one with my Nexus One. I then posted that video to Youtube (below), later to Granada Theater’s Facebook fanpage.

I am still researching and creating documentation that is a quick easy read to teach people about the codes. But at this point in time it remains up in the air if we will continue using them due to being somewhat ahead of the curve.

I will say recent mainstream attempts including the one below for Iron Man 2 beginning to crop up so it’s a possibility that it could be continued.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2517/3893829249_6811a7a77b_o.png