Every month or so, RTCRM’s Interactive Strategy team regroups to discuss emerging interactive trends, up-and-coming technologies and expanding usages of social media that we’re seeing applied outside of our client industries.

In our most recent caucus, our team noted the rising usage of QR codes in the magazine and publishing world. While QR codes are an innovative way for print publications to offer readers expanded content/discounts/realtime sales, publishers need to ensure that the technology behind this value-add is widely usable and relevant to their consumer base.

In our test we found that the QR codes, of a particularly wide spread fashion magazine, proved a huge technology fail when a commonly used mobile QR code reader app returned the magazine’s submitted codes as “unreadable.”

When implementing emerging technology like QR codes, there’s potentially nothing more deadly then a user trying and trying to access interesting content and have the application, website, etc. continually fail them. For the users, it’s an immediate turn off and can make he/she reluctant to try the experience again. Worst case scenario, it renders portions of your printed content skipped/glossed over by your readership. Not good.

So while these “cool” and “cutting-edge” technologies, like QR codes, may help the struggling print market, it’s important that marketers/publishers/editors/brands think through these potential add-ons and weigh both the pros (expanded content) and cons (usability fails) that come along with these emerging technologies.