Today at work I was playing around with my new Verizon iPhone 4 and found a suite of apps related to scanning QR codes. These codes are square speckled two-dimensional bar codes that can contain a surprising amount of information.

I found a great site and discovered that it had a paired iOS app:

QR Code Creator Site: http://bit.ly/dziTfL

QR Code App: http://bit.ly/h97j6H

If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, you should check them out!

So that got us started on possibly weaving QR codes in a lot of our promotional materials. Some of the ideas I’ve entertained revolving around these codes are:

• History of a building, photos of its construction, where the funding came from and some of the neat things about the building that people might like to know.
• Raffle codes on the back of WMU game tickets, we insert a random QR that people have to SMS or Email to enter a raffle to win a prize, or something.
• If these codes are up on billboards, we could provide a full vCard for WMU including admissions, our website, and other contact information.

As I got to thinking about the QR codes, it’s an avenue to enable printed material to have a digital effect, in a way it completes a round-trip for information. The path from digital to physical is usually via printers, and this is a way for physical to cross back into digital. The information technology, marketing, and pure geek factor are all very high – it’s very exciting!