There continues to exist a widespread,\u00a0bizarre\u00a0phenomenon of companies printing social media icons and sticking them on printed materials without any context or URLs.<\/p>\n
Widespread, because you don\u2019t have to look very far to find examples of doing it wrong. Bizarre, because this is basically free promotion for sites like Facebook and Twitter but does nothing to help these companies. It\u2019s a stunning example of just how real the\u00a0business world\u2019s digital divide\u00a0still is.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s also a systemic enough problem I was\u00a0easily<\/em>\u00a0able to document in my personal travels the following 4 examples:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Ummmm\u2026and what exactly are we supposed to do here? Where do we go? Why should we? We can\u2019t click your magazine ad, but thanks for the reminder that Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and Foursquare exist. Because that\u2019s what is happening here.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Unbelievable that a social media marketing conference put this on their printed flier. Strikingly absent is the most important item for a conference: the hashtag. And don\u2019t get me started on the even more obvious missing URLs. To give them the benefit of the doubt, I tried a Twitter search and a Google search but came up short even finding these people on Twitter as one example. I\u2019m sure I could have found it via operator queries and some more tries, but why would anyone do this? Makes me wonder if the people running the conference even understand the content that will be presented.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I took this photo the other day in Union Square in downtown San Francisco. On an absurdly busy sidewalk. As if someone is going to stop, randomly and notice the comically tiny QR code and load it up on their mobile. Instead of, I don\u2019t know, entering the store? Again: Facebook and Twitter must be loving that the entire world is blanketing themselves with their logos. Sheer brilliance on their part. Absurd for any company to do without the URLs\u00a0or at the very least the handles. Oh, and good luck to this store considering that, statistically, the\u00a0odds are\u00a01 in every 244 might even\u00a0potentially\u00a0<\/em>use\u00a0QR codes (and how many would actually stop on a busy street to load this up?).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I found this on the back of a mailer that was sitting on the counter in our office. Can you spot all the things wrong with the above image? Not only did they include http:\/\/, www, the \/#! in the Twitter URL \u00a0and the \/user in YouTube (all\u00a0totally unnecessary) they even managed to mess up the Facebook and Twitter logo placement. It really begs the question: does the person who designed this even\u00a0use<\/em>\u00a0the internet? Looks like they copy-pasted some URLs and threw this together in about 5 minutes. At least they provided some sort of benefit statement for each channel, although what\u2019s up with the capitalization inconsistency? This really tells me nothing other than the company doesn\u2019t care about their marketing.<\/p>\n Is this stuff really so hard to get right?<\/p>\n Oh, and if you\u2019re looking for advice on what you should actually do to promote your social outposts\u00a0in printed materials, Jonathan Richman\u00a0has some tips.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There continues to exist a widespread,\u00a0bizarre\u00a0phenomenon of companies printing social media icons and sticking them on printed materials without any … <\/p>\nExample 1: \u00a0the icons, no CTA, no URLs<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Example 2: \u00a0the icons, CTAs \u2026but no URLs<\/strong><\/h3>\n
\u00a0Example 3: icons and QR codes \u2013 no URLs, no CTAs<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Example 4: well, some are just hopeless<\/strong><\/h3>\n