By Janus Boye
Chris Justice recently joined enterprise link management vendor BL.INK. Previously Chris worked in senior marketing roles at IBM, Jahia, Magnolia and Vignette.
To quote Chris Justice, VP Operations at BL.INK:
“Content management systems have evolved to allow us to organize information so elegantly but they still fail when it comes to simplification of data.”
According to Chris, QR codes and short links build the missing bridge between the consumer and the complex taxonomy of purchases, software errors, shipping instructions, restaurant menus and thousands of other use cases.
In a recent member call, Chris focused on links, one of the fundamental building blocks of the Web, essentially left untouched by innovation until recently, yet a crucial part of a modern digital experience.
Paraphrasing Web co-developer Tim Berners-Lee who back in 1998 famously wrote Cool URIs don’t change, Chris said: Short links will live forever. Unfortunately, as you probably know the Web of 2022 is full of broken links and that probably also goes for many of your past 100 marketing campaigns.
Below I’ve shared my notes from the interesting conversation and towards the end, you can also find the slides and even the entire recording. The conversation started by Chris saying that content is not king.
Accessibility is the new king
Chris opened by sharing how he was a loyalist of the Joomla CMS for 10 years until someone made another choice for him. His changing jobs and roles made him work with tools like Drupal, Vignette, Magnolia, WordPress and several others, where he found that not only does information change across the tools, there’s was something bigger happening is well. Chris put it eloquently:
“Content turns to stone over time”
With this he meant that links often doesn’t resolve for very long, consistency tends to break quickly and there’s no real sense of longevity for the information. That’s a real problem which leads to both a bad customer experience, and also lost opportunities.
If you then connect this with the rising privacy awareness, improved legislation (think GDPR) and the removal of cookies, you have what you could simply call a new situation. Or as Chris said:
“What has worked for 100’s of marketing campaigns no longer cuts it.”
To be clear, content is still important, but ensuring accessibility is critical according to Chris.
It’s all about compliance and security
In the call, Chris also covered how compliance and security have become the big conversation this past year when dealing with customers.
Specifically, he said that the security of your CMS and the tools for generating QR codes and short links should be at the top of your priority list because QR codes and short links will live forever.
As an example, he shared how BL.INK since 2021 has supported dozens of teams at Nestlé including agencies, vendors, and employees. Rooted in Spain, but serving their global teams, BL.INK has made tremendous strides to unify the tools used to manage links and QR codes across multiple global brands and teams while providing required oversight and standardisation
I was able to meet Chris Justice in Copenhagen in May 2022 for an informal coffee conversation
Another example of how BL.INK connects the world through managed, monitored, and measured branded links is their work with Coca-Cola on SmartLabels. Since 2009, BL.INK has supported the global teams at Coca-Cola including agencies, vendors, and employees. You will find BL.INK embedded in vending machines, software, packaging, tools, and campaigns along with BL.INK links in every SmartLabel product code.
What is quishing and why you should care
Chris also covered one of the latest cyber frauds - quishing. Quishing is shorthand for QR phishing, where criminals use QR codes to steal data.
In this GovTech article on Beware of 'Quishing': Criminals Use QR Codes to Steal Data, there’s a few notable and recent examples from earlier this year:
Scammers slapped stickers with fake QR codes on the pay-to-park kiosks in several large Texas cities. Drivers who scanned them were directed to a website that asked them to enter their credit card or bank account information.
Officials in Atlanta reported that drivers were finding fake parking tickets with QR codes on their cars, directing them to a phony website. Real parking tickets in Atlanta don’t use QR codes.
QR codes are easy and convenient, but similarly to being cautious when clicking on new suspicious links, we also need to learn to look out for QR codes that might look tampered with.
Future of CMS and indefinite lifespan of links, products and people
Looking to the future, Chris shared his vision of how content remains valuable much longer than today. We need to be able to create infinite and perpetual content.
Also, customers expect no limit on attributions and require links that expire, say after a deadline on an offer.
It remains to be seen whether this will become a standard part of the CMS or whether it will be left to digital governance and marketing software vendors like Little Forest and Siteimprove. Either way, there’s innovation happening in the enterprise link space and we’ll be following it closely.
Learn more about enterprise link management
Back in November, Chris also shared why he joined BL.INK with trackable QR codes being a part of it.
You can also continue the conversation on enterprise link management in person at the CMS Kickoff 23 conference in St. Pete, Florida in January where Chris will be joining us.
If you go back in time, then I also wrote about the importance of links back in these 2008 posts:
Finally, you can download the slides (PDF) or lean back and enjoy the entire recording from the call.