Just recently, they launched a pilot program in Singapore’s train stations to allow locals to purchase Valentine’s Day gifts at discount using QR codes, reported AllThingsD.

To purchase a gift, commuters would need to download a QR code reader on their mobile phones to scan the right spot on the poster. They will be brought to a webpage where they can purchase the product using PayPal. The experiment is being run on 15 subway stations in Singapore.

PayPal’s initiative follows a similar move by Cold Storage supermarket during the Christmas season last year, in which they offered groceries like Christmas ham to commuters at a couple of train stations.

Both programs are likely inspired by supermarket chain Tesco in South Korea, which is apparently the one that started the whole trend.

While Tesco reportedly received positive results and increased sales because of their virtual stores, it’s unclear if Cold Storage experienced a significant boost as a result of their experiment.

Although QR codes have frequently been dismissed as a gimmick and a passing fad, it’s more likely that the technology will see niche usage among marketers, who are still figuring out how to use it effectively.

It is also competing with even more advanced technology like NFC, which many believe will herald the new age of mobile payments. But NFC is unlikely to supplant QR codes completely, since both have different use cases.

PayPal appears to understand this well. It is putting its eggs in many baskets, investing in NFC for its Android app, and also working with Home Depot in the United States on a small point-of-sales trial.

Check out the video about PayPal’s Valentine’s Day special in Singapore:

More epic stuff about QR codes:

Ten QR code sins to avoid
QropIt hopes to take QR code implementation to the next level
Good and bad examples of QR code implementation (from Facebook)

QR codes are beginning to enter the mainstream in Singapore, driven by the mass adoption and usage of smartphones, and I expect this trend to continue in 2012.

But while critics might argue that NFC technology will supplant QR codes, I wholeheartedly disagree. Although NFC trials are slated to start in Singapore this year, I’d wager that mainstream adoption is at least one year away (depending on whether the iPhone 5 adopts NFC). It’s likely that QR codes will remain the de facto bridge between outdoor and digital marketing for some time.

Furthermore, even if NFC does reach mass adoption, it only has a range of 4cm. This limitation will mean that both technologies could co-exist as marketing tools.

Entrepreneurs with limited marketing budgets should seriously consider implementing QR codes as they are cheap to create, easy to implement, and measurable in their impact. It imbues marketers with the ability to track performance metrics in outdoor advertising, something that wasn’t possible before.

In this article, I provide ten QR code sins that marketers and entrepreneurs should avoid at all costs. Some of these tips are taken from a whitepaper published by the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), a global trade association for mobile marketing.

1) Treating QR codes as a one-dimensional tool

Don’t insult QR codes by limiting its potential. While I’ve seen them being used for directing consumers to a website or YouTube video, there’s so much more that can be done with them.

These include: Offering special deals and promotions, making voice calls, sending SMSes, making purchases, participating in a poll, receiving contact information, and posting messages on Facebook or Twitter.

2) Having an unclear or weak call-to-action that draws little attention

A Citibank ad spotted at City Hall MRT. QR code should be made bigger to emphasis its link with the copy. The small text should be eliminated altogether.

Good marketing copy matters when implementing QR codes. A good rule of thumb would be to use active voice as opposed to passive voice. For example, use “Scan this to receive 10% off your next purchase” instead of, “There is a 10% discount off your next purchase after you scan this.”

Also, make sure that your QR code copy is large enough so that passerbys will be able to see it immediately. If the words are as small as ants, only people standing right in front of it will be able to see the copy.

Here’s a question: What’s worse than having bad QR code copy? Having none at all, which was the case for Tony Tan’ campaign team. He was then a Presidential candidate for Singapore’s Presidential Election in 2011.

3) Providing little or no incentive for consumers to scan QR codes

While the previous point speaks to the style of QR code copy, content matters too. Another rule of thumb to follow is that the copy should answer the “why” and “how” of QR codes. Why should consumers stop in their tracks and whip out their smartphones, an inconvenience in a fast-paced society like Singapore? For consumers who don’t know about QR codes, how would you educate them?

Beyond offering consumers the pedestrian URL to your website, think about how QR codes can contribute to online conversions, your bottom line, or brand education (like Starbucks did). Your copy should reflect these aims.

In developing markets where consumers aren’t quite as educated on QR code usage, consider directing them to a QR code reader like RedLaser, which also scans barcodes, or Google Goggles, which can even scan books, landmarks, and so on.  ShopSaavy has a ‘Scan the ShopSaavy’ art that you can put on your product packaging.

4) Not drawing enough attention to your QR codes

A QR code often has to compete with many numerous other elements in an outdoor advertisement. Whether or not you decide to make QR codes the primary focus of your ad, some design basics can be implemented to make it stand out.

First, ensure adequate spacing aroundyour QR code to give it emphasis, as having too many visuals around it will distract potential customers. Second, ensure your QR code is large enough. The Mobile Marketing Association recommends using the Five Times Rule — “the distance that the user will be scanning should beabout Five Times the size of the code.” Test it out to find gauge the distance the consumer is likely to be away from the marketing material, as well as the size the QR code should be.

Finally, you can implement unique QR code designs. This Mashable article gives tips on how to design beautiful QR codes.

5) Making QR codes the only option in markets with low mobile penetration

QR codes are useless if your target market has low mobile phone penetration. In such cases, make sure you offer elements like hotlines, website URLs, or email addresses on your outdoor marketing material. Also, don’t immediately dismiss QR code usage in countries with low smartphone penetration because many feature phone these days have QR code scanners. Do your research to find out about the feature phones in these countries and whether they have native or third-party QR code scanners installed.

6) Putting the QR code in places that deter consumers from scanning

QR codes at the urinals? Hmm, not too sure about that one. Photo: Robert Nyman

Some common sense and understanding of the psychology and cultural nuances of consumers are needed here. Putting QR codes above the seats in a subway train might sound like a good idea, but think about how embarrassing it may be for them to stretch their hands out to scan a QR code — under the gaze of fellow commuters.

Putting a QR code above a toilet urinal may sound like a good idea, but some consumers might be put off with the idea of using a smartphone in the toilet, especially since it can be unhygienic.

On the other hand, putting these materials in table tops at a cafe or restaurant might be effective, since patrons are not in a hurry and are more likely to spot and scan the QR code.

It’s clear that QR code implementation must be done with sensitivity to the surroundings. Printing marketing materials wholesale without any thought to where it’s being put signals laziness from the marketer.

7) Pointing consumers to a website through an extremely long URL

According to the MMA, QR codes that contain a lot of data are harder to scan and complex in appearance. Hence using URL shorteners like bit.ly or goo.gl can help in making the data more manageable. These two shorteners even allow you to create a QR code along with the URL.

8) Using QR codes without analytics

The key advantage of digital marketing is the ability for companies to track a campaign’s effectiveness. QR codes extend this characteristic to outdoor advertisements, making it an invaluable addition to your arsenal.

Singapore-based startup QropIt (see our product feature) has a free web app that is a QR code reader, QR code generator, and analytics tool all rolled into one. A similar alternative is BeeTagg, although it’s a pay-as-you-go service.  Tagloop, a Singapore-founded freemium service, ties in both NFC and QR code solutions with analytics. Finally, if you’re a heavy Google Analytics user, this article tells you how to track QR codes with it.

9) Ignore the post-scan experience of consumers

Pat yourself on the back for creating a killer marketing collateral. But don’t forget the post-scan experience. Consumers will find it extremely frustrating to scan a QR code for a coupon only to find out that it hits a dead link or a deal that has long expired. Therefore, it’s crucial to think of QR codes not just as a standalone tool but part of a larger integrated marketing effort.

Think about it: If first-time users are turned off by your badly implemented QR code, they might never again scan another QR code. That’s bad news if you are planning on using QR codes again in the future.

One way to improve user experience would be to mobile-optimize your site. Don’t ignore the basic design elements of your website. For example, if you want consumers to buy that product, ensure that the ‘buy’ button on your mobile site stands out.

Test and optimize your web content for popular smartphones like the iPhone and Samsung Galaxy S II, tablets like the iPad, and even feature phones with QR code scanners. A new buzzword in web design is ‘responsive design’, which is a website that adjusts itself according to screen size and resolution. If your aging company website is in need of a complete overhaul, revamping it to be responsive could be a good investment.

Finally, make sure you cater to users who scan your QR code after the campaign expires. Include a message indicating that the discount coupon is void, and direct them towards the promotions section of your site.

10) Putting your QR code campaign out in the market without first testing it

This may sound like an obvious transgression, which is why some may overlook it. While a QR code is easy to implement, there are so many elements and steps to it that something may easily go wrong and go unnoticed. Make sure you test it repeatedly, taking into account the location of the QR code (what if the 3G network is spotty in the area? What if it’s monsoon season and your poster is placed in a location with no shelter?).

Ultimately, it’s a very bad idea to use QR codes just because they’re the latest marketing fad. Think carefully about your campaign objectives and whether QR codes are a good fit. Your marketing campaign, after all, shouldn’t just revolve around some newfangled tool. Leave that to the QR code startups.

Some examples of great QR code implementation here and here. Came across examples of good or bad QR code usage? Snap a picture and share it with us on Facebook, Twitter, or Google+!

Special thanks to them for their contributions to this article: Nityanand Rai, Kuek Jinhua, Rebecca Laurien, Nasrul Mukasim, Jeffrey Paine, Sudhir Gupta, and Jeff McNeill (Apologies to the rest whose suggestions didn’t make it. Maybe next time!)

Here are several key points summarized from the full report.

1) Social networking has emerged globally as the activity which Internet users spend the most time on.

Social networking sites are reaching 82 percent of the global Internet population, or 1.2 billion users. The activity now accounts for 19 percent of time spent online, making it the most popular activity on the Internet. That’s a huge jump from a mere six percent in 2007. Social networking is followed closely behind by search/navigation, retail, and communication.

2) East Asian countries spend the least amount of time on social networks.

While social networking is almost universally a popular activity, cultural differences do matter. While Asia Pacific are seeing high penetration rates for social media, its Internet users are spending only 11 percent of time online on social networks, or slightly under three hours a month.

In contrast, Latin Americans are the marathon runners of social networking, clocking in at 28 percent and over 7.6 hours of monthly usage. Israelis have emerged as the most prolific social media users, at 11.1 hours. In Asia, Philippines is the only outlier occupying the global top ten.

While usage patterns differ across continents, what is similar is that women consistently use social media more than men, or 1.5 hours more per month to be exact.

3) Older people no longer form the minority of social media users (with the exception of Asia).

It used to be true that social networking is a young person’s game. But older people have caught on in the past 18 to 24 months. In fact, the aged 55+ segment is the fastest growing among all age groups.

However, this trend is far more noticeable in North America, Latin America and Europe than in Asia Pacific, where old people still lag behind. Penetration rate among those above 55 in the Asia Pacific is only 59.8 percent against a global average of 79.9 percent.

Internet users aged 15 to 24 are the most prolific at utilizing social media, while those above 55 are the least regular.

4) Facebook continues to be the most dominant social network.

Facebook reaches 55 percent of Internet users worldwide, accounts for three-quarters of the time spent on social networks and one in seven minutes of total time spent online. Facebook is the leader in 30 out of 43 individual countries tracked by comScore in the beginning of 2010, and has since gone on to capture pole position in six more countries.

Today, there only seven markets where Facebook is not the largest player ?– China, South Korea, Vietnam, Japan, Brazil, Poland, and Russia.

5) Microblogging tools like Twitter, Tumblr, and Sina Weibo are gaining traction.

Today, Twitter reaches one in ten Internet users globally, hitting a growth rate of 59 percent over the past year. It has emerged as an important tool for ordinary citizens to report on important events like the Japanese Tsunami and the death of Steve Jobs as well as organize political movements like the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Sina Weibo, the tenth largest social network worldwide, is the leading microblogging tool in China with an impressive 181 percent growth rate in the past year. Tumblr, in 12th position, grew by 172 percent over the same period of time. These two tools have registered the strongest growth among the top 20.

With microblogging tools registering the strongest growth, it’s likely they’ll become an even more dominant force in the social media world for years to come.

6) Among the top 20, US-based social networks are attracting vast non-US audiences.

The top four social networks — Facebook, Twitter, Windows Live Profile, and LinkedIn — all have the majority of their users coming from outside the US.

7) Google+ surged to 25 million users faster than any social network in history, but future success remains uncertain.

Google+, which is Google’s own social network, was off to a fast start. It reached 25 million global unique visitors in under a month, and now currently has 65 million users, or five percent of the total social networking audience. To put things in perspective, Facebook took 36 months while Twitter needed 33 months to reach the milestone. However, while sign-ups have certainly increased, Google+ weekly visits have actually dropped to 1.16 million in August from a peak of 1.8 million in July.

8) In the US, social networks lead in online display ad delivered, but lag in terms of spending.

More online display ads are now being displayed on social networking sites than anywhere else, capturing one quarter of US ad impressions. This mirrors the rise in social networking as the predominant activity for Internet users. However, advertisers are still not paying a lot for display ads in social networks, accounting for only 14.8 percent of total US online display ad spend.

Top brands like General Motors, Ford, Toyota, Volksagen, IBM, Intel, HP, P&G, Unilever and Coca-Cola have used the Crisp platform to reach publications like CBS, CNN, ESPN and Yahoo!, as well as ad networks Jumptap, Millennial and Mojiva.

The deal will merge Crisp’s rich media advertising solutions with Smart Device Media’s marketplace to provide brands the ability to extend their reach to mobile devices and other emerging platforms.

“The mobile ad market is at the critical stage where premium brands are starting to play significantly,” said newly appointed Crisp Media CEO Jason Young, who previously co-founded Smart Device Media.

“Yet because barriers to buy still exist, the premium market demands an integrated set of solutions optimized for its unique needs.  Crisp Media will be a catalyst for the industry, by bringing together an unrivaled combination of platform, products, services, and team expertise.”

In April, Crisp received a US$6M investment from EDB Investments (EDBI), the independent equity investment arm of the Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB), along with existing backers Meritage Funds and Intel Capital. Subsequently, Crisp planted its Asian headquarters in Singapore.

EDBI aims to contribute to Singapore’s economic growth and by investing in knowledge and innovation-intensive sectors of biomedical sciences, clean technologies, Internet & digital media, and others.

Ambient will be using Amobee PULSE for Publishers to manage mobile advertising for thousands of publishers and global brands in its network, while MCM will use Amobee PULSE for both Advertisers and Publishers.

The Vietnamese advertising network claims to reach 70 percent of online consumers in the country.

“91% of the Vietnamese population uses mobile phones to manage many facets of their daily lives,” said Andrew Stephens, CEO of Ambient Digital.

“The mobile phone is ubiquitous in Vietnam; therefore, reaching these consumers through mobile advertising will be an effective way for large brands to build relationships and get results.”

Trevor Healy, CEO of Amobee, believes there is more to Asia besides India and China. “We are taking the road less travelled and are going to focus on great markets like Vietnam, Singapore, Indonesia and Philippines.”

Merah Cipta Media (MCM) Group is a group company that provides complete solutions in branding, marketing, communication and digital media for major industry players in Indonesia. It is situated in a fast-growing mobile market with close to 100 percent mobile phone penetration.

Said Grant Watts, Amobee’s regional vice-president for Asia-Pacific: “With Amobee PULSE for Advertisers and Amobee PULSE for Publishers, MCM will be able to bring value to the entire mobile advertising ecosystem, and deliver highly relevant and immersive mobile ads to Indonesian mobile phone users.”

Thousands of Singaporean commuters taking the train at the Bugis and Boon Lay MRT stations will be in for a Christmas surprise: They can purchase now groceries by scanning QR codes with their smartphones.

The squarish bar codes are placed next to pictures of the items, which are on a wall. Commuters will then be brought to the Cold Storage website, where they can key in their details and get the Christmas ham delivered to their homes. It’s an interesting integration of mobile commerce and ambient marketing.

Dawn Loh, managing director of SMRT Investments, told Channel NewsAsia: “A lot of commuters are always time-starved. Sometimes, they may not have time to do grocery shopping. Online shopping is a way to go now, so with a virtual store now on the public transport network which is very pervasive, we hope that the commuters can take onto this very quickly and more will come on board.”

This initiative started on 7th December and will last till 20th December.

However, Lee Xian Jie, a 22-year-old entrepreneur who passed by Bugis MRT, felt the implementation could have been better.

“The location the advertiser chose was outside the station, and the high traffic does not allow people to stop and snap, as they would wish. If the ads were in the platform area, on the sliding glass doors, people would pay more attention since they would be literally sitting around waiting,” he said.

Singapore is not the first country to have done this. In South Korea, supermarket chain Tesco did something similar in a subway station. Said an Adverblog report: “Online sales between November 2010 and January 2011 increased by 130 percent, with the number of registered members rising by 76 percent.”

2011 has turned out to be the year where QR codes have entered mainstream Singapore and many other parts of the world. Step out of the train at City Hall MRT, and you’ll see a huge poster of the upcoming Sherlock Holmes movie with a QR code that brings you to the movie trailer.

Even our political scene has seen some QR code action, with current President Tony Tan using them on his campaign posters during the Presidential election in August.

I can’t vouch for the effectiveness of how these mobile barcodes are used though, but I expect that as marketers get used to this tool, they’ll become better at it.

Image: Screengrabs from Channel NewsAsia video clip

Sprooki is an app that lets shoppers find out the latest deals near them, purchase the products in-app, and redeem them at the store. Sounds like just another daily deals app? Not quite — it’s much more than that.

Think of it as Groupon meets Chalkboard, with retail analytics built-in.

It is an end-to-end platform that lets retailers push their promotions to mobile users in the vicinity, receive payment directly from customers who use the app, and analyse data about their customers.

Malls too can benefit from using Sprooki, which allows them to launch campaigns, schedule alerts, view real-time results and sales, and read post-campaign reports.

The consumer end has a social media element built into it — shoppers can ‘follow’ stores they like to receive promotions from them, much like on Facebook. This benefits merchants as well since it’s an additional channel to build customer loyalty.

The Singapore-based company was co-founded in February 2011 by Claire Mula. They cooperated with 313@Somerset, a shopping mall located along the Orchard Road shopping belt, to launch their app in November for the iPhone.

So far, the free-to-download app has accumulated more than 35,000 promotions viewed in under three weeks.

While some might think that shopping centers have gone entirely out of the picture in the e-commerce space, I like how this company has not forgotten the fact that malls still hold much sway in the Singapore retail industry. Sprooki is smart to leverage on them to promote their own app, while at the same time offering malls a tool to promote their brand alongside the merchants under them.

“hello i wish to rent a taxi for 1 day and propose to my girlfriend. the taxi will be decorated with photos of us and wordings of: will u marry me? flowers will be placed on the back seat of the taxi and i will call for the cab. venue will be near central area, to be confirmed again,” the message went.

While some would ignore this plea, EatAds.com CEO John Fearon found an opportunity.

“We thought it was a unique request and wanted to make someone’s dream come true,” he told SGE via email.

So his company decided to go the whole nine yards: They arranged for the taxi, printed and installed the proposal onto the vehicle. John also arranged for a videographer to document the whole process. The proposal happened at the end of July.

Silong, the groom, and Jia Ni got to know each other more than four years ago, while they were taking biking lessons.

“We were in the same class and I just can’t get my eyes off her,” said Silong.

“After the motorbike lesson, I saw her chase after the bus, therefore I chased after her. I went up to her and asked to be friends. So we exchanged numbers.”

Their first date did not begin until about a month later, when he was bored one day and decided to ask her out. They soon went on more dates and the relationship blossomed.

“While crossing the road, I just took the chance to grab her hand and never let go since then,” he said cheekily.

Check out the video on their love story below. Skip to 1.20 if you just want to see how the proposal went!

SGE wrote about Wildfire (XingXingHuo in Mandarin) before (exactly one year ago!) when they received their Series A.

A few days ago at the TechVenture 2011 Gala Dinner, I happened to sit next to one of the founders, Christoph Zrenner. We got talking and here we catch up on their progress.

What is the biggest thing that has happened to Wildfire in the past 12 months since we last wrote about you?

A lot of things have happened! When Benjamin Duvall and I started this together with a Chinese partner, Liu Kai, in 2008, we were the proverbial crazy guys with a crazy dream but things have really accelerated since we received VC funding a year ago. We’ve had two industry and China veterans join the team, Marc Rivoira formerly GM at Saatchi and Saatchi X in China, and Claire Pribula, previously VP Sales Asia at a listed consumer analytics company, Acxiom.

When you get those kind of people on board, it really takes the company to the next level. We’ve also taken another strategic investment a few months back from a private investor who is very well networked locally after having founded a number of highly successful businesses in China and SEA.

So things have just been coming together in many meaningful ways for Wildfire, in terms of repeat business from clients, developments on the technology, real strong talent on the team, a great group of investors. Looking back, there was a lot of luck involved, too.

How does it feel to receive the SVCA award?

Doing any start-up is really hard. Doing it in China, let’s just say there are very few examples of successful foreigners who hack it in China. And then, on top of that, trying to establish a new and innovative business model in a market that is growing so fast on all the proven ways of doing things, that’s actually a little crazy. So when SVCA recognized us for what we are doing on the innovation front with this award, it really meant something to all of Wildfire’s team, a recognition of the hard work we’ve all been putting in.

Christoph receiving the Most Innovative Company SVCA 2011 award for Wildfire.

In the beginning, you do a lot of the things you do on faith, because you believe in something, and a little external recognition actually goes a really far way!

What is the biggest thing you’ve learnt in the past year and how are you changing the company to deal with it?

If you look at the marketing industry, you see tremendous amounts of money being spent to bombard consumers with brand messages. Nobody gets fired for spending tens of millions of dollars on a TV campaign. Why? Because TV actually still works pretty well in China. So we’ve had to ask ourselves, what role is there for the sophisticated influencer word-of-mouth media that we provide. Our original motivation was to “fix a broken industry”, to change the way that brands relate to consumers in China where the kind of consumer cynicism you see in the West hasn’t set in yet. Ben’s work with BzzAgent during their early years in the US and Dave Balter’s books on Word-of-Mouth marketing, that is really what inspired us to build a media channel consisting of 100,000s advocate consumers who spread the brand’s message but authentically and in their own words.

Social Media is shifting the power balance from brands to consumers but for a brand to trust their advocates to do the talking, that takes guts. The decision makers on the brand side who took the time to understand the details of our process, how we find, educate, incentivize and measure the performance of brand influencers, they are real marketing heroes: Wildfire’s early adopters from Kraft Foods, The Campbell Soup Company, Bailey’s, Rexona, and others. What we’ve had to learn on our side is that influencer Word-of-Mouth is just one piece of the media mix puzzle and we’ve had to develop the tools to measure and prove how this component amplifies everything else the brand does, whether it’s digital, in stores, TV etc.

In fact, with the real-time tracking technology we developed over the past year, what we can do now goes way beyond word-of-mouth as a media channel: imagine you have access to 100,000 advocates, you know what they really and authentically believe, and you have the tools to deploy them to change ongoing conversations on-line and in the real-world.

Let’s talk a bit more about your technology: are you an ad agency, a media channel or a technology company?

Good question! What we are actually doing is a combination of two things, influencer seeding and social CRM: Influencer seeding means that we have a growing network of 100,000+ influencers (we call them Sparks) and the tools to identify, educate and incentivize the right consumers to spread the brands message (importantly, this is all authentic, they are unpaid volunteers!). Social CRM means that we have the tools to identify relevant conversations as they happen on the online space and in the real-world in Asia Pacific and China.

Based on these capabilities – a private network of people and a proprietary set of technologies – we offer three different products covering the whole product lifecycle. The first is “InfluencerMedia”, that’s using advocate consumers for reaching and impacting targeted consumers. The second is “InfluencerInsight”, which is using the conversations we capture for forward-looking real-world research (as opposed to focus groups and surveys), for example to answer the question of whether a product will succeed or fail in the market. The third is “InfluencerForce” which is the Social CRM product, but we need to keep the details about how this works confidential until the launch in November.

Do you have any general advice for startup founders with an eye on China?

China is hard and you really, really have to want it to succeed. If you can suffer (“eat glass” as one of the judges at Techventure put it today) and are prepared to put at least 3-4 years into an adventure with an uncertain outcome, China is the right place for you at the right time and there are plenty of opportunities to adapt investable business models from the USA to a Chinese context. (Another of the speakers at Techventure described opportunities as buses: don’t run after one you just missed, the next one will come and then you might even get a seat). All the usual advice applies: Build something that people want. Listen to your customer. Don’t run out of money. You can start alone, but don’t run the business alone, you need to have a partner you can rely on.

For marketers and firms who want to test the effectiveness of their social media marketing campaigns, tools like Bitly and Google Analytics have been crucial in gauging success.

Now, Twitter wants to get into the analytics space too, and it will be rolling a Twitter Web Analytics feature over the next few weeks, reported GigaOM.

According to the Twitter blog, this new feature offers several benefits: It allows you to see the amount of traffic Twitter is sending to your site, measure the effectiveness of your tweet button integration, and understand how viral your content is on Twitter.

Twitter’s new analytics tool ties in with the introduction of the universal t.co URL shortener, which essentially wraps around every link shared on the social network.

So, if Twitter Web Analytics is as good as it sounds, could it rob Bitly of users? This is certainly possible, since they offer virtually identical features. The guys at Bitly better think long and hard about how to regain that competitive edge.

But I wonder how both Twitter and Bitly will stack up against Google Analytics and its new Social Engagement feature, which was launched in June 2011? Google Analytics allow users not only to track how much traffic is coming from various social network, but also how engaged they are. It even collates demographic and geographical information.

If only Google has their own URL shortener…

Anyway, whatever the case, companies are spoilt for choice with regards to the social media analytics they can use to track their marketing ROI. It’s up to you to decide which tools best suit your needs.