Today is the twentieth day of Diduary. You can see links to all of the published articles in the series here.

Yes, I’m talking about Microsoft Tag. No, I’m not just introducing it. I did that just over a year ago, with my article: “Tag, You’re It!“

In short, Microsoft Tag is a simple way to connect the offline world with the online one. By using your phone to “scan” these Tag images, you can give your users/customers/employees more information about the thing they scanned.

What’s cool about these, however, is that they are completely customizable. So, instead of the standard collection of multi-colored triangles, you can create tags with rich imagery, and they still work.

After you create your Tag data, you are given the option to “Render” your Tag. At this step, you want to choose “Custom,” which gives you a tag with dots rather than triangles.

Once you have this dotted tag, you can customize it by creating an image that utilizes the colored dots, in their appropriate locations. Here’s an example of a custom tag being created:

This is an incredibly simple way to engage your customers in a new way. For some of my ideas on how you can accomplish this, check out “Tag, You’re It!“