Yesterday, I collaborated with my colleague Alisa Leonard on thoughts about the implications of Google+ Pages for marketers. Read an excerpt below or the full post at greatfinds.icrossing.com.

Google+ Pages: Real-Time Platforms for Connected Brands
By Tarah Feinberg | November 7th, 2011

 

The launch of Google Plus Pages today provides marketers a distinct opportunity to engage in real-time marketing on an extremely powerful connected platform. Google+ is not another social destination site; leave your comparisons of Facebook and Google+ at the door, please. No, the doors have swung open for businesses and brands, large and small, to develop deep and focused connections with their audiences across bought, earned and owned media. Google now has an indisputable foothold across all of those media. Marketers that leverage the platform effectively will see impressive results.

It is more important than ever for brands to act like publishers, and Google+ promises to enhance the relationship between search and social. But Google+ isn’t just about search, either. As our colleague Rob Garner wrote on MediaPost recently, “this is about social relevancy, or in other words, using technology to improve one’s social networking experience in a highly meaningful way.”

At this point, I think that the most utility for marketers considering using QR codes lies in the lack of effort on the participant's part. However, it's only effortless if that person has a code scanner on his/her smartphone. That's still a relatively big barrier, but the more widely adopted that functionality becomes, the more useful these will become.

One of the ways that we're using QR codes at Real Branding, is by creating a distinct code for each platform it will be used on (print, event materials, digital, etc.), allowing us to track the effectiveness of each. This will help us to gain key insights about our audience's behavior and preferences, extremely quickly, not to mention that it's free & simple, thanks to bit.ly. It's exciting that it's starting to become so accessible, both to marketers and audiences.

Are you using QR codes for marketing campaigns or other reasons? Let me know in the comments.

QR codes are everywhere these days — in fine art exhibits, some cities’ building permits, wrapping paper and every imaginable kind of marketing campaign.

QR code-focused startup JumpScan was kind enough to send along a graphically organized representation of some data they’ve gathered about QR codes — who’s scanning them, what kinds of devices they’re using and what brands are running QR code campaigns.

Cooler still, you can scan every QR code in this infographic to get more info, making this Mashable‘s first interactive infographic. So have your smartphones at the ready, and click the image below if you need to see a larger version.

When you’re done clicking, scanning and learning, riddle us this in the comments section: When was the last time you scanned a QR code, and what did you get out of it?

Image courtesy of JumpScan.