According to a report by AdAge, Facebook has made a huge hire which will change the way the company markets itself to consumers. In fact, Facebook hasn’t done much marketing of itself at all, so this hire is a one to pay attention to.

Reportedly, Facebook has hired Rebecca Van Dyck to be its head of global marketing. Having spent just 11 months at Levi’s, Van Dyck worked alongside Steve Jobs at Apple during the release of the iPhone, iPad, iPod and iTunes. Needless to say, Van Dyck knows consumers.

Van Dyck’s history is impressive, as you can tell by her previous experience:

- SVP, Chief Marketing Officer at Levi’s (11 Months)
- Sr Director, Worldwide Marketing Communications and Advertising at Apple Inc. (3 years)
- Sr. Director, WorldWide Advertising at Apple (4 years)
- Global Account Director, Nike at Wieden+Kennedy (12 years)

Given that Facebook will be publicly traded within the next three to four months, the company will need to put itself out there to draw more users, developers, and most importantly, businesses to advertise on the platform. Given Van Dyck’s pedigree at Apple, the company could fast become a more user-friendly when looked at from the outside.

We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment and haven’t heard back yet. We’ll let you know if we do, though.

UPDATE: A Facebook spokesperson told us:

We can confirm that Rebecca is joining the marketing team and we are thrilled she’s decided to join us.

Yesterday, I wrote a post about a company called TagMyDoc that found a pretty useful purpose for QR codes. I was hard pressed to find other actual useful purposes for QR codes, since they’ve become a bit of a marketing fail.

One company disagreed and sent me its QR code pitch, and it’s pretty darn good.

App2Card helps you build simple business cards to promote your app specifically, with a QR code on the back that brings people directly to your download link upon scanning it. The impressive part of the site is that the card itself is unique, in that it takes your app’s icon and makes it the entire front of the card.

If you’re a developer, it’s the perfect handout to get people to check out your app later, especially if you have a great icon.

Find your app, create cards quickly

The site requires no design work from you at all. Simply perform a search for your app if it’s on Apple’s app store, or create a custom card if it’s on another platform.

Creating cards for iOS apps is super simple, as the site grabs your icon and URL automatically. You’re shown the preview of your card, and can purchase them for a pretty good price, considering that they’re a cool custom size.

When you’re at a tech party or in a meeting trying to impress VC’s, dropping a few of these off is way more impressive than giving them your old boring card. After all, it’s your app that’s important, not you. They’ll stand out too.

So perhaps I was wrong, QR codes can be quite interesting when the idea presenting them is unique and executed well.

➤ App2Card

There’s no doubt about it, marketing on Facebook is something businesses are doing more and more as the social network grows closer to one billion members. The Facebook ad team has actually done a wonderful job working with engineers at the company to build an easy to use, self-service ad product that makes Google AdWords targeting seem silly and incomplete.

You can target Facebook ads to people of a certain age, location, or area of interest. You can get really focused with your marketing.

This infographic from Flowtown shows survey results the company collected about who is marketing on Facebook. Impressively, 69% of the businesses they spoke with are utilizing Facebook for this very purpose. The infographic also shows that Health Care is the most expensive industry to market on Facebook, and it would cost you upwards of $320,000 to get 300,000 likes on your Facebook page. Wowser.

Click here to see it in its full glory:

According to a report by AdAge, Bitly has pushed out new reputation monitoring and social search features for its popular link shortening and analytics service.

Since Twitter has decided to take control of short URL’s to do its own analytics service, Bitly has been forced to look elsewhere for growth and customers. The company has decided to focus on real-time reputation monitoring, so companies knows exactly who is talking about them, what they are saying, and where they are saying it. It’s a smart move, since Bitly has gotten wide adoption for its URL shortening service.

Bitly is very late to the real-time monitoring party, and competitors include companies like PeopleBrowsr. With the growth of social media, data and analytics are the only way to prove whether its a worthwhile marketing expense to manage a Twitter account and Facebook page. Companies are putting money into social media, so they are automatically putting money into analytics.

Andrew Cohen, Bitly’s general manager, told AdAge that Bitly has shortens 80 million URLs a day, which is an astounding number, considering Twitter started shortening URLs themselves. This points to the fact that most companies who started using Bitly have stuck with them.

New catch phrases are buzzing around, such as “Conversation Search”, since there is all of this data on the web with no way to collect how effective marketing efforts have been. While this might show that Bitly is reaching for a new source of relevance, it does have a strong user base and massive usage, which may make it a front-runner in the social media data race.

You can learn more about Bitly’s enterprise offerings here.

In what appears to be a first, a musician has turned to cult location-based game Geocaching to promote his music.

The campaign promoting German-American rock ‘n’ roll violinist David Garrett involves around 1,500 unique trackable items in the form of 2”x2” metal tags on keychains which have been hidden across the US and Germany. Each tag features a photo of Garrett and a unique code, and when they find one, fans can enter the code on Garrett’s Facebook page to log its movements before hiding it at a new location for someone else to find.

A range of prizes are available for participants in this innovative competition which looks to engage fans of the platinum selling star.

While it’s yet to cross over into mainstream culture, Geochaching is a pastime that involves hunting down ‘caches’ hidden at locations around the world. Caches are located with the aid of GPS tracking equipment or a mobile app.

Leveraging the game for a promotional campaign should be positive for both Geocaching and David Garrett, although it would be perhaps a little more interesting if each hidden item included a USB stick containing an exclusive track, or some other incentive for finding the itembeyond being entered into a prize draw.

There’s been a noticeable increase in the use of QR codes in marketing of late in the west, long after they became a common sight in Japan. However there’s still quite a way to go, it seems, before these little square blocks of data become truly accepted.

A survey of 1000 British teenagers has found that 72% of 11-18 year olds don’t have the software to read QR codes or aren’t aware their phone can read them. Additionally, only 43% believed QR codes could be read by a phone, 8% of girls thought they were a magic-eye picture(!) and only 33% knew what they were called.

This lack of awareness is understandable – most phones don’t ship with a dedicated QR Code reader built in, and limited space in marketing materials often makes displaying detailed instructions on what you need to do to scan such codes a little difficult to achieve. It’s not a new problem – in late 2008 I wrote about a Pepsi campaign that went as far as listing twelve tips for scanning a QR code – including the desperate-sounding “Try anything!”

The findings of the new survey, issued in a mailshot by youth research agency Dubit, shows that if the codes are to take off beyond curious early adopters, consumers need to be educated on how to use them. Whose responsibility is this though? Should phone OS designers add a large QR button right into the interface? Should an enterprising developer create and market a QR code reader with the aim of becoming a widely known brand that everyone knows they need to use? If so, where’s the economic incentive for them to do that when charging for the reader software would be pointless?

There’s no easy solution, but without one these handy physical shortcuts to the Web might remain strange little ‘magic eye pictures’ forever.