Microsoft Tag Beta for Marketing

July 8, 2009 by Bruno

I have used mobile tags for a few marketing projects and used both the QRCode and Datamatrix code tags to link to some of my online content via mobile. If you haven’t heard about Mobile barcodes or tags here’s a very nice summary that might help. I’ve been following the development of these technologies through the years, this is why I was very curious about Microsoft’s mobile Tagging format and began to fool around with its beta version to try to find out if they had any advantages over the competition.

To start, I was very impressed by their administration platform which helps you order and manage all of the tags you create, you can even divide them by categories and makes them very easy to manage and edit.

It was very easy to create my very own Microsoft High Capacity Color Barcode (HCCB) within minutes I managed to have the tag up and running. Here’s how my HCCB Barcode looks like:

If you scan it with your mobile camara, it will redirect to my website although you will need to download this Microsoft scanning software into your mobile.

The “Custom HCCB Barcode Option” lets you add your logo to the barcode’s background. As I am marketing guy, I found this option to be very useful, although this feature is also available by other mobile tagging solutions like Beetaggs or Trillcode. The advantage of adding images to your barcodes or tags is that it might suggest and increase the intent of user to scan your barcode and access additional information online.

Adding your Brand or Logo to tags becomes a very powerful marketing tool, especially if you are commercializing products and want a bit more interaction with your website’s content. Catchy graphics in your barcodes and might encourage your potential customers to visit and investigate your products with their mobile and increase their purchasing intent on the spot. Check out my custom made tag like above it will redirect to my website if you scan it with your mobile, you need to download this Microsoft scanning software into your mobile:

Compared to other scanning software the app performs solidly and feels very robust even if your mobile photos shift a little or the photo is not focused, another nice advantage over the competition.

But for me, the most important feature of Microsoft’s Tags is its analytics features which help us create various reports to analyze the performance of categories and tags. With the help of these reports, we can track the progress of your categories and tags within a specified time span. We can even find out the localities where our tags and categories are receiving more scans. This will definitely help us marketers manage more efficiently our campaigns and promotions.

So what are the disadvantages, well the biggest one unfortunately is like most of other Microsoft products they have chosen the proprietary route, this gives other mobile tag solution providers with more open platforms to have an advantage. There is high number of companies, as mentioned before, who have been on the mobile tagging market for many years, who are looking for innovative ways to add value to their services like for example Semacode who are now integrating their mobile tags with social media networks, they currently only have Facebook integration but they will be adding support for other social networks soon.

In short, if you are already using Windows Mobile applications this tagging format will fit like a glove with some applications and it is highly recommended for other users who want to track the performance of their tags, its report capabilities are ideal for campaign performance evaluation and other marketing purposes, thumbs up Microsoft!

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