There’s an old joke: “What’s black and white and re(a)d all over?” The original punch line was “a newspaper.” These days that punch line should be updated to, “a QR-Code.”

If you’ve visited your favorite store recently, or flipped through the pages of recent issues of magazines, you may have seen something that looks like the new millennium version of a hieroglyphic. The good news is that these Quick Response Codes or QR-Codes are much easier to make sense of than their Egyptian precursors.

The QR-Code is fairly new phenomenon that offers exciting possibilities for marketing and publicity. But to understand the value of these codes it’s best, as with all things, to start at the beginning – with a few FAQs on QRCs.

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“We’ll get around to it when it’s standard practice.”

That seems to be how many companies are thinking when it comes to getting their site ready for mobile access. For many, it just doesn’t seem like designing a company’s website for mobile access needs to be a priority. How many clients and prospects are really going to visit your site this way?

So how do you know whether your company’s site should be mobile-ready? The fact is, if you have taken the effort to develop a website for your company, you should take the extra step to embrace the possibilities of a presence in the world of mobile Web.

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Imagine you’re preparing a slide presentation to deliver to an audience. But there are a few details about your audience that will affect choices you make in preparing your slides.

First, the audience members each speak a different language – from English to Spanish, French, German and Italian, to Mandarin, Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese and Bengali. Not only that, but you also have to account for the fact that within each language, there are multiple dialects and accents.

As if the language-dialect-accent issues weren’t complicated enough, each member of this audience is also wearing special lenses that limit the type of presentation they can see. Some can only see material that’s rendered for High Definition viewing, while others, only 3-D. Your challenge, as the presenter, is to prepare your slides and spoken material so that every member of your audience receives all parts of your presentation.

Impossible?

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Content management systems (CMSs) have been available for years and have recently been gaining in popularity. A particular trend is the use of Web content management systems (WCMSs). One reason? The economy. Some organizations are trying to cut expenses by performing previously outsourced tasks in-house. But what are content management systems? How do you know if they are the best approach for you? And how can you use them? 

There are many different kinds of CMSs. A broad understanding of a CMS is that it helps you manage and publish a Web site while allowing you to update site content with limited technical know-how. Some of the benefits are that:

- Multiple users can edit the content of the site, which reduces bottlenecking

- It makes frequent site updates easier

- Non-technical users who can’t write HTML or CSS code can edit content directly in the browser

- There may be lower costs associated with maintaining Web-based CMS, and companies need not buy software like Dreamweaver, FrontPage, GoLive or an HTML editor

- CMS offers uniform pages, so multiple users don’t stray from the overall design

However, a company considering using a CMS should also be aware of possible concerns, including the effect it may have on search engine optimization (SEO) and page load speed. So how can you decide whether this is the best option for your company? Here are some questions to ask:

1. What are the editing and updating needs, in terms of frequency and complexity?
2. Is there a system in place to ensure that the people updating content will adhere to quality control guidelines?
3. Are there adequate personnel or expertise to manage the CMS?

This last question addresses a popular myth about CMS: that CMS will automate every step of site updates. The fact is that content creation still requires management of workflow and respect for deadlines.

If you are in doubt about whether CMS fits your needs, you may decide it’s best to outsource site maintenance to a professional with technical expertise. Or you may want to consider the dual-benefit approach that some companies enjoy:  using CMS to allow regular in-house updates, while depending on the services of a professional or expert team for their major design capabilities, and to ensure the overall management of site integrity.

At the end of the day, it’s wise to remember that CMS is a tool, and like any tool, its utility is a function of its users’ expertise, its users’ understanding of its capabilities and recognition of its benefits and limitations.

It was only a decade ago that technology insiders prophesized a change in the way that the Internet would be used. Darcy Dinucci’s 1999 article, “Fragmented Future,” predicted the emergence of an interactive Internet, where users would not just read published material, but would contribute to the content of the site. Deemed Web 2.0, these interactive sites have helped shape the Internet over the last few years. Millions of people now share content worldwide through Facebook; students conduct research for term papers through Wikis written by other people; and millions joined in Ashton Kutcher’s race to one million followers on Twitter – and then thousands watched as Kutcher proceeded to “ding dong ditch” Ted Turner live on Ustream, CNN and other Internet streaming sites.

Despite the popularity of Web 2.0, the predictions of monetary gains that would dwarf Amazon and Yahoo never materialized. However, the rapid expansion of Web 2.0 through social media sites such as Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn has led those same insiders to predict the Internet’s evolution to Web 3.0 – which will take the Internet to another level for users and supposedly help those operating the Web sites to make a significant amount of money in the process. So what is Web 3.0 and how will it impact healthcare marketing, communications and advertising? (more…)