I will be in Boston attending ILMEast at the end of this month (March 25-28). I am seriously contemplating not bringing business cards to this event. Instead I am thinking of bringing only one card that contains a QR code with all my vCARD information and give this to people to scan with their smartphone. Of course I also use the LinkedIn and Bump apps which are both great ways to share contact information.
My motivation in taking this approach is three-fold,
- I don’t really need to be carrying more stuff with me when I travel,
- It is a convenient feature for potential contacts as they no longer need to enter my information manually
- I have to believe their is a positive environmental impact of not using business cards.
What do you think? Would you consider not bringing business cards to an event or conference?
QR Code Generation
A really interesting site that allows you to make a QR code that links to practically any source such as a vCard, webiste, email, Google Maps location, twitter account, etc. is QRStuff.com. Here is my QR Code that will take you to my LinkedIn profile.
If are you looking for a quick and easy way to create a QR code, this is a great site to start with.
Canadian QR Code Data
Of course the first question any marketer is going to ask is what is the usage. I have some data that I compiled from the US that shows what people are using QR Codes for. I also have some Canadian Data of QR Code usage.
The first set of data is from eMarketer that shows Sources of where US Mobile users are scanning a QR Code. Notice that the audience side of scanning from a business card or brochure is 1.9M.
Here is another snapshot from eMarketer that shows the reasons that US Smartphone users have scanned a QR code. As this is still in early days, I buy the notion that almost half of people are using our of curiosity. However, 41% are using to get more information, which of course means capturing a person’s contact information from a business card.
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Finally here is some data from CDN users. This was released by ComScore in November 2011, Smartphone Adoption Reached 40% in Canada. According to ComScore 8.1% of all mobile subscribers and 18.1% of Smartphone subscribers have used QR Codes.
