ReadWriteWeb

If your business is looking to webinars to reach potential customers, Bob Darabant of Astaro has a couple of tips that might keep your cast from falling flat. Hint: Making it sales-focused is probably not the answer. Darabant, VP of Astaro Americas, has a handful of suggestions for making webcasts work for VARs – but these apply pretty well to any business that might be pondering a webcast.

New data from comScore show that 14 million Americans, 6.2% of all mobile users, scanned QR (quick response) codes or bar codes with their mobile devices in June 2011. Users who scanned QR codes were more likely to be male (60.5%), between ages 18-34 (53.4%), and have a household income of $100k or higher (36.1%). The most likely places for people to scan QR codes were on printed magazines or newspapers, product packaging, or on the Web, straight from their computer screen.

We've covered some interesting ways of employing QR codes to bring the Web out into the world, like QR-enabled tourism and scavenger hunts. But comScore's new data show that, at least for now, QR codes are mostly used in more traditional marketing efforts, and they reach a specific demographic of young males in high income brackets.

Ansca Mobile, in partnership with InMobi and PapayaMobile, has today announced LaunchPad, a suite of marketing and analytics services targeted towards mobile application developers using Ansca Mobile's Corona SDK. The services will allow developers to better market their apps, increase distribution, improve monetization and better understand their audience, the companies say.

We've written on auto-posting before and there still seems to be a debate as to whether or not it actually affects performance to post via bot. Anecdotally, I've found that manual posting shows significant increases in performance.

When I first started at ReadWriteWeb, the updates to Facebook were automatically posted via a Facebook application. It was an easy way to make sure our fans got to see our posts, but it didn't foster community discussions so after I got my bearings around here, I stopped the app (or at least I thought I did).

Marketing firm Fiksu has launched two new mobile application indexes that will of interest to both app developers and marketers alike. The indexes provide insight into industry averages related to app downloads in top app stores as well as the costs associated with acquiring new users.

It may have only launched a mere month ago, but Google Plus is already showing signs of promise to online marketers, especially in its ability to drive traffic to other Websites.

Google's brand new social product has a long way to go before it poses a realistic threat to Facebook's massive marketshare, but having surpassed the 20 million user mark in under a month, its growth has been impressive. By comparison, it took Facebook and Twitter a few years to reach the same milestone.

Despite all the attention that social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn get as a way for marketers to expand their reach, technology buyers are not using them as primary sources of sources of purchase information, reports research firm Forrester. Print publications and company websites still far outweigh social media when it comes to informing IT buyers and it looks like that is not going to change anytime soon.

It is easy to use a Facebook page or a Twitter account to expand a brand's reach. Set it up and start posting and the marketing department hits its "reach" quotient for the quarter. Yet, for business-to-business (B2B) technology suppliers get little value from their social media initiatives. Hence, Forrester recommends businesses augment their social media strategies to become more effective sources of information for making technology-purchasing decisions.

How often do you want to "engage" with your toilet paper brand? Or your phone company? What about your bank? If you're like me, if you want to be "engaged" at all you want to initiate that engagement when you have a question or problem, and then you want that engagement to end once the problem has been solved.

You don't want coupons for toilet paper in your Facebook stream. You don't want to read tweets from the CEO of your mobile carrier. You don't want to get e-mails about the interest rates on money market accounts your bank offers.

You just want to be left alone until you need something. Does that sound right?

We just came across a new service which app developers are going to love: App.net, a site that lets you make customizable landing pages for your mobile application. Using simple templates, your landing page can feature a description, a mockup of a mobile phone with a rotating carousel of the app's screens, links to download the app on various app stores, social sharing buttons and links to your company's online presence on sites like Facebook and Twitter.

The price of advertising on the world's biggest social network appears to be on the rise.

The average cost of purchasing pay-per-click ads on Facebook rose by 22% in a single quarter, according to a new report by digital marketing platform provider Efficient Frontier.