1. With a single board, the Michigan Lake to Lake Bed and Breakfast Association offers big value for their members, nicely showcasing and linking each.

2. See Red, as a color takes on a strong branding role for the American Heart Association.

3. Here’s an accountant who understands how to think out of the box and bring some fun where others might not be able to imagine any.

4. Wisconsin’s Marquette University recognizes that Pinterest is a perfect tool for creating interest in campus life and traditions as well as making potential students feel comfortable and already somewhat engaged in the institution. We think this article about the potential of Pinterest for universities has some value.

5. Nationwide Children’s Hospital offers a little heart, a little education, a little branding. Yet another blog offers some thoughts about how hospitals use Pinterest.

And finally, one more resource to get you thinking pinterestingly.

If you find a particularly effective Pinterest approach, please comment below and post the link, so we can see. This is all still so young and new!  It will be exciting to watch businesses get their heads wrapped around how to create their best fit and maximize the potential.

Research has convinced us that Pinterest deserves our attention. Simply put, it is a virtual bulletin board with collages of images and comments. Much like Twitter and Facebook, the magic of Pinterest is in the interaction with other users – sharing, commenting, and borrowing material, not just posting.

For marketers it’s potential is huge. This is a new form of community… the on-line- drinks-with-friends, where you tell each other your latest great finds (a particularly female way to bond). What offers more effective marketing impact than having someone else talk about how wonderful you (or your products) are? Pinterest fills a unique niche in the spectrum of integrated marketing, providing lots of appealing visuals and unlimited reasons to share on other social media platforms. Do be aware of the copyright specifications, which essentially contradict the whole point of Pinterest.  You can read about that here .

Pinterest saw a 2,700+% surge in traffic since last year and people spend extended time exploring these these pages.  The average user household income is $100,000 and about half of users have families, so it’s a dream audience for most products and services.

If you intend to use Pinterest as a marketing tool:
• Post things people would want to share, gaining exponential visibility.
• Make it personal, moving, entertaining, informative, or collaborative. 
• Clarify your CALL TO ACTION. What do you want users to do…go to your website or blog to buy or learn something, enter a contest, share a posted item?
• Think SEO – when you pin your products, add your website link. Write concise descriptions and carefully choose keywords.
• Cross-promote the content you publish with your blog, Twitter or Facebook page.
• Add a “Follow Me on Pinterest” button to your website and blog as well as a “Pin It” button, making it easy for people to share content with a single mouse click.
• Comment and thank users for pinning your items. Follow other users. Pinterest has the potential to become a highly effective customer feedback tool.

Here are just a few possible applications:
Contests: Contests can get really creative on Pinterest and can be promoted across a business’ social media profiles. For example, hold a contest for the best image pinned of a customer using one of your products.
Market research: informal market research. Publish images of products, packaging, or ads in development and ask for people to share their thoughts through comments.
Education: Share your published how-to videos on YouTube or tutorials on your business blog. Create a pinboard for all of your helpful content to give it broader exposure.

Like anything new, this is fascinating, and comes with learning curves. Like any marketing tool or advertising medium, it has its place. It will be interesting to follow its trajectory.

The Educational Advertising Awards is the largest educational advertising awards competition in the country.  This year, over 2,900 entries were received from more than 1,000 colleges, universities, and secondary schools from all fifty states and several foreign countries.

Judges consisted of a national panel of higher education marketers, advertising creative directors, marketing and advertising professionals, and the editorial board of Higher Education Marketing Report.

Higher Education Marketing Report has been the nation’s leading marketing publication for higher education professionals for 26 years.  The monthly publication is read each month by thousands of marketers at colleges and universities throughout the country.

The Arts Council of Greater Lansing has arranged with Adams Outdoor to post billboards which help promote the arts in the greater Lansing area.  Barb Hranilovich, the ZimmerFish illustrator, enjoyed seeing the series from last year and will be one of the artists whose work is appearing in 2012.  She chose this image because the medium in which it was done (encaustic) is unfamiliar to most and she hoped the unique surface might pique interest.  The strong textures should also come to life at the massive scale.

Barb’s board will be going up Thursday, February 16th on I96, just west of  MLK(99). The timing is good, as Barb has two encaustic exhibits later this year; in April at Midtown Gallery in Kalamazoo and in August at Mackerel Sky in East Lansing.

Please let us know if you’ve passed by and seen it.

What’s new and filling in the gap if Flash no longer applies? HTML5. This is the latest version of HTML, the standard the language that allows us to create for the Web.  It’s comprehensive and versatile and opens the door to animation, though it’s still somewhat in beta phases.  HTML5 is intended to enable seamless transfer and optimization from desktop to tablet to mobile.

HTML5, this youngster, is still awaiting approval by W3C (the powers that officially approve such things), so adoption has been slow. People are hesitant to invest in something without a guaranteed future.

Still, HTML5 has gotten the attention of digital marketers with promises that one can create and place ads of any size, rich with animation and interaction, taking consumers all the way through a transaction right within an ad.  Media planners can map campaigns across a greater breadth of channels than ever before.

Watch for even tighter geo-targeting, and two-way conversation for online purchases, letting customers ask questions about products.  The potential is still just that – great potential to be mined.

The trick is, as with all media, to determine when is the right time to apply it.  Simple answer? When customers are ready, meaning they’re on mobile devices.  HTML5 is knocking at our door and is likely here to stay.

Check out this very fun and truly informative little book with a bit about HRML5.

Though we’re dedicated to our jobs here at ZimmerFish, we actually have personal lives, too.  Barb’s pretty much revolves around creativity and making messes of some sort or another. Barb does commercial illustration for our clients, but also exhibits her fine art in galleries.  She’s currently busy during her home time doing encaustic pieces for two two-person shows to go up later this year.

The Arts Council of Greater Lansing has  featured Barb this month on their website.  She was a 2009 recipient of an individual artist grant from this wonderful organization, which advocates for all arts in this region.

ZimmerFish is looking forward. The point has tipped in marketing and advertising.  Customers are savvy and informed. They watch or read what they want, when they want, and we need to reach them where they are.

Here are some marketing tactics we believe it’s time to embrace:

Engage the senses.
Let audiences interact with your brand on an emotional and multi-sensory level. This enhances brand favorability, perception and recall. More than using a distinctive color or using a logo in a consistent manner, it could be part of the product itself, like a phone ringtone or the fragrance of a cleaning product.

Create a bond.
Help consumers experience a bond by encouraging them to interact with your brand in a specific way, like Oreo’s twist, lick and dunk campaign.

Make your customers your sales reps.
Word of mouth is the most powerful lure in the tackle box.  If you can create content so engaging that early discoverers will take pride in passing the word and being in on the latest, the response will be viral.  Office Max’s Elf Yourself is an example.

Tell a story.
Brands with a back story allow a culture and audience to be built around that story – earth-friendly, chic, or philanthropic.  Think Tom’s shoes.

Cross-channel.
Tie traditional mass media to fully realized search and interactive tactics. That likeable Super Bowl ad is just millions of dollars in the trash can without a fusion of search, website, promotion/contest, mobile site, social network strategy, print, radio and place-based media support and extensions. The better you integrate, the more bang you get for your buck.

We’ll talk more about each of these in future posts.
May 2012 be interesting and profitable!

Well, the working pad is small and awkward and I felt like I was three years old with my first crayon.  I know how to get to a sophisticated line, but the idea of trying to keep myself engaged in the artistry of a piece while switching from one setting to another for brush type, bristle length/width and the like left me sadly cold and frustrated. I’m used to working faster and more intuitively. I really want to like this tool and will keep working it out, but it just can’t compete with the sound of pencil on paper or the swish of my brush in the water.

This little illustration took on a life of its own when I decided to “paint” areas with photographs, something I’ve not done before.  Now, that was fun and it’ll be nice to have this new technique in my bag of tricks.

Scavenger hunts. Helpful for getting visitors to check out places they might not otherwise go.

Labeling.  Take people to a mobile site where they can learn more about or even buy your product(s).

Storefront displays. Post a Shop Online Now! QR code for after-hours visitors. A potential lost sale turns into an online customer who’ll share a lot more of their contact information with you.

Discounts and giveaways. Create discounts that are specific to the QR codes. Run the codes in ads or post throughout your store. Turn them into a “retweet” so that your shoppers share their discount with their followers.

Garments. Put your QR on garments or accessories. For more engagement, put different messages on the irems, so people take more scans of more of your codes.

Go after Likes and Follows. Create mobile-friendly landing pages with Facebook like buttons or lead them to your Twitter page for a quick follow. A like or follow can create a long-term marketing opportunity.

Supplement your retail space.  Link to how-to videos, or info about how products were sourced. Bring visitors to review sites for unbiased reviews of products, or to an e-commerce site to find out-of-stock items.

Build your email subscriber list. Use your QR code to send people to your email signup. Give people a compelling reason to subscribe.

Get the phone ringing. QR codes can make a phone call or generate SMS text messages.

Excerpted from BY FC EXPERT BLOGGER RICH BROOKS

http://www.fastcompany.com/1720193/13-creative-ways-to-use-qr-codes-for-marketing