TechCrunch is reporting on some users seeing the ability to generate a QR code in their profile. This is interesting – and when the news coincides with the announcement of Facebook as the most highly-trafficked website, it's easy to get excited about this. Like many, I've carried a torch for QR codes for the past couple of years. Like most things that get big in Japan first, they work, they're well-engineered, and dammit, they're cute. And they're everywhere at SXSW this year, right? So that must mean they're ready to tip, and all they need is a little push from Facebook, the latest market-making giant to command the internets.

Here's the problem: it's no more than a minutes worth of work to put a barcode on a page that you can pick up and distribute to send a browser to a URL. There are quite a number of lonely, lightly-used services out there that will generate QR codes that, when viewed with a reader on your mobile, will hit a link or display some text.

But there's the other, more difficult half of the tipping point: "when viewed with a reader on your mobile."

Just do the math: less than 20% of US mobile owners have smartphones right now. Let's be optimistic and say, oh, 1% of them have downloaded a QR-code reading app onto their phones. Even more optimistically, let's say those readers work all the time. And sure, some feature phone owners could download a BREW app for their phones. But it's unlikely.

It's cool to have a QR code on your Facebook profile, maybe, or on a billboard or a sack of cat food. But if only a tiny fraction of your potential audience are able to take part and use the code, what's the point? If you're an individual without much to lose, no big deal. I'm sure social media strategists and our requisite summer social media interns will do it right away, but what about a P&G brand manager? Does information that is only useful to a tiny fraction of your audience merit valuable square inches on your package, your FSI or your billboard? Or as a key component of a consumer promotion, as QR codes have often been used to date? Probably not.   The good news – Facebook can help. Here's how:

• Guys – please, pretty please – to start, put a QR code reader into all your Facebook mobile apps. Facebook has the numbers (7,367,770 visits from Facebook mobile apps on 3/16/10, according to All Facebook) and the mobile engagement model to drive QR code reader functionality better than anyone else. Help get it out there.

• Second, make it useful beyond the boundaries of Facebook. Let me use it to snap a QR code on an add, and let it launch the browser inside FB that lets me view whatever it is that QR code was set up to see – even if it's not somebody's Facebook profile page. Open it up. See it as an opportunity to put an event on my wall – "Robert just used the Facebook QR Code Reader to enter Southwest Airline's Snap a Million Miles Sweepstakes" – rather than something that only works inside a closed Facebook garden. (This is a completely hypothetical. Don't Google it – doesn't exist. SWA doesn't even use "miles" in their program.)

Google put the codes out there, but hasn't done much to drive reader adoption. They've got their own phone to drive reader distribution, for crying out loud, but it doesn't have the ubiquity of Facebook. Will Facebook's QR code strategy help drive us past the tipping point here - or is it just another SXSW t-shirt? Fingers crossed.

Robert Davis is SVP, Digital Marketing for PJA Advertising + Marketing, a full-service agency with offices in Cambridge, MA and San Francisco. He's been annoying clients with QR code ideas for three years or so without getting much traction so far. And to be totally open, like the rest of us, he has no idea what Facebook's plans are beyond what he reads in TechCrunch. They could be secretly planning to put QR codes on the moon, for all he knows. Just sayin'.
   

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