While we wait for QR codes to take off, there is a huge opportunity for brands to use the barcodes that are already on products and turn them into social media.
One way to do this is through an app called Stickybits, which we wrote about back in April after its launch at SXSW. The app lets users scan and attach media to barcodes, creating a path from physical product to digital media. People connect around objects and often share stories about them, which is essentially what Stickybits enables. You can add a digital picture, a video, or text to a product's barcode, which other people can see when they scan the same barcode with the app on their phone.
Advertising is all about stories as well, so why not attach a brand's stories to a barcode? To demonstrate this idea, we took a can of Diet Pepsi and attached branded wallpapers, nutritional facts, and information on their Pepsi Refresh campaign through Stickybits. (Note: we didn't attach things twice, the app is a bit buggy.)
This weekend we got a number of emails from informing us that "pepsico attached a new bit" to the 'Pepsi 12 oz can' we were using. This turned out to be an "official bit" from the brand -- a video about the storytelling power of barcodes.
Stickybits founder Seth Goldstein announced these “official bits” at the Conversational Marketing Summit in New York City, and that Pepsi is signed up as the first sponsor. Similar to the paid search model, Pepsi paid for their bits to get the "official" stamp and appear on the top of results pages.
According to Techcrunch, Goldstein described the progression of media on the Internet at the conference:
In 1996, Webpages became media. In 2001, search became media. In 2005, people became media. In 2007, status updates became media. Last year, places became media. And in 2010, he predicts, objects will become media.
This is part of the trend we've been following known as the "Internet of Things," wherein physical objects are connected to the web. Digital is now freeing up physical media to play a different role than it ever has before, and mobile phones are an important piece of this puzzle, enabling users – and brands -- to annotate the world around them.
