Branching Out! Marketing Yourself Online

I was invited to speak about marketing yourself online at an ALIA Sydney event on 27 May 2013, Advocate, Promote, Brand.

Looking Dorky for Science...Library Science!

I got some funny looks today as I went around town. A sticker on a bus stop bench caught my eye - The Red Hot Chilli Peppers and an asterisk-shaped QR code, which I’d never seen before. How clever to make their logo into a stylised QR code! I took out my smartphone and selected my QR code reader. Kneeling down, I lined up the camera with the sticker and waited for the sound that indicated a successful scan. A passerby clearly wondered what on earth I was doing down there. The scan resulted in a website URL, http://www.rhcpqr.com, that announced the release of their new album. There's an article with more here, but the poster shown has way more detail than the sticker.

A little later, at the train station, I saw a very arresting poster for author Richelle Mead’s new release, “Bloodlines.” The bottom left-hand corner featured a (square) QR code, but it was tricky to crouch and train the camera on the code before the JCDecaux frame slid another poster into the slot. (If it were me designing the poster, I would have put the code in a less awkward spot! I felt really dorky waiting for the poster to come back into place when my first scan was unsuccessful, and the last thing a YA reader wants is to feel like a dork.)


As a future librarian, I was excited that
a) a book had a large glossy poster to advertise it, and
b) the publisher was hitting their target market (young adults) by using a QR code that pointed to a YouTube video with an “unlocked” video from the author.

Also, I have never read any Richelle Mead, but I might now!

Want to learn more about QR codes? Try the Common Craft intro.