The integration of place-based media with mobile and social technologies is consistently in the top five predictions for the future of our industry. Yet very few companies have wrestled with the realities of integrating these technologies at scale.

Even the simplest social media application can trip up inexperienced companies hoping to leverage user-generated content or streams publicly.

For example, a user might be delighted to check-in to a place using a location-based service such as Foursquare and receive “offers nearby” but the location owner will not be so happy!

Similarly, Tweets that can be displayed on a location’s screen should not have URLs that can’t be clicked on, multiple retweets of the same message or messages that are offensive.

Place-based versions of such apps have to benefit the location as well as the consumer - for example, only displaying appropriate offers for the specific location and displaying filtered and localized tweets.

Solving such problems for single locations is waaaay easier than solving the problem for 100’s or 1,000’s of venues, each with different engagement rules – but all expecting real time media and responsiveness.

At this years Digital Signage Expo, in Las Vegas, Feb 22-25th, LocaModa will be releasing LocaModa 4.0 which builds on our company’s experience delivering the world’s first place-based versions of Twitter, Facebook Places and Foursquare for global brands, place-based networks and advertising agencies. And as you might expect, it specifically addresses the above challenges for licensees with a few venues or a few thousand venues to manage.

LocaModa’s booth is 1032. We hope to see you there!

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I’m happy to see that Shelly Palmer is giving a keynote at next month’s DSE on “DOOH Disrupted: Paths To A Connected Future.”

Words like Mobile, Multi-channel, Cross-channel, Social, etc are high on our agendas and prominent in all our market forecasts. And of course, all these words and technologies are by-products of the connected world we live in. So I hope that Shelly emphasizes in his talk that connectedness can never be an afterthought. It’s strategic and critically important. Our screens, players, media, infrastructure and data cannot survive as islands. Our industry is clearly moving in the right direction - it wasn’t so long ago that most out-of-home screens were playing video tapes!

The opportunity is for more DOOH media (for example DOOH applications, messaging and adverts) to work across channels. This can only hasten industry growth in scale and value.

I gave a talk at last year’s Screen Media Expo in London titled The Future Is Now which I think is worth re-visiting. You can view the presentation here. At the end of that presentation, I suggested a ten question “connectivity test” as a fun way to provoke discussion (I’m sure some of those questions could be better framed today but hey it’s free!).

What’s your DOOH connectivity score?

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A poll on Experiate last week questioned the designation of ‘industry’ for the digital out of home ideaspace. I quote:

Do we see ourselves as a unique and growing industry with a specific architecture (rules, regulations, trade shows, organizations) that works in tandem with other forms of communication, like our TV at home, computers, and iPhones?

Or do we see ourselves as an application inside a multi-channel communication culture with standards and practices that we should adopt?

The results thus far (from a fairly limited sample set of 47 votes) favor the latter, but only marginally.

David Weinfeld offers his insight on the close tallies:
“Digital signage is an industry, in and of itself; and digital signage is not an industry… Approaching digital signage from the technology side of the equation, it most certainly is an independent sector. [Yet]… When framing digital signage within the world of media, it is but a piece of a much larger ecosystem. In the same way that the word “mobile” will cease to have meaning in an increasingly untethered world, so too will digital signage meld into a world of free flowing media.”

I have to agree with David here… a “yes to both” is really the only way to make sure the relationship among media in the current climate (DS included) is properly represented. The main takeaway here is far less about the semantic designation and far more about developing an evolving set of best practices that both define DS conceptually within the mediascape, while also respecting the unique technical and UX demands required for successful deployment.

Cast your vote here.
It may be time to rally for a write-in option…

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This post is the third in a series of Tips for Displaying Social Media Content on Place Based Screens. Previous posts in the series discussed removing URLs and revealing backgrounds and the value of curation.

Many of LocaModa’s social applications involve pulling in content from Twitter and Flickr. In addition to basic Twitter to Screen and Flickr to Screen apps, more specialized apps like social polls and the Foursquare app also rely on tagged social media content in addition to real-time text to screen capabilities. As discussed in my post yesterday on Moderation v. Curation, engaging content proves essential to grabbing eyeballs for more than a split second, particularly in people-packed places. I’ll say it again: curation proves to be the best route to clean, culled content.

But what if your campaign is on a smaller scale than most LocaModa cross-channel executions, and you choose to rely on tagging alone to bring in relevant messages. Are you instantly hampered by misappropriated, mishmashed content?

Not if you tag smart.

Here’s a round-up of social media tagging tips from our years of experience here at Loca. Although these guidelines overlap in many ways with basic SEO and keyword marketing logic, these tips focus more specifically on place-based displays.

1. For a screen directly correlated to a specific venue, be careful if your bar or cafe name is on the generic side. No one at Joe’s Gourmet Pizza wants to know that “haha… my bro Joe stayed at the bar til 4am and then puked pizza on the cat. lol.” Well, maybe they do. But probably not while they’re eating.

Instead of tagging simply “joe” and “pizza,” tag the entire phrase “Joe’s Gourmet Pizza.” You’ll sacrifice message volume the more specific you are, but you’ll gain precision. If you’re not going to go the curation route, specificity in tagging will save you headaches from patrons later.

2. Watch your homophones. As an example of our current World Cup campaign: the Brazil superstar, Kaka. You giggle; Venue owners won’t. Toilet humor and selling sandwiches don’t mix.

3. Some venues try to take the easy way out and tag their screens with random “fun” tags like “party,” “bash,” and “awesome,” thinking it will pull in light, happy messages. Well, let’s experiment. I just went to Twitter and searched for “party.” The first tweet in the list:

It’s not offensive, but it’s certainly irrelevant, particularly if the venue was going for a fun and light vibe. In short, perform multiple Twitter and/or Flickr searches for the tags you have in mind before committing. Oftentimes, the context you’re thinking about isn’t the prevalent one.

4. Along the same vein, watch your hashtags. If you’re staging the National Safety for Farm Workers convention, you probably don’t want to tag your screen #nsfw. That’s probably not how you want to envision your horses.

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This post is a follow up to Part I: Tips for Displaying Social Media Content on Place Based Screens: Removing URLs and Revealing Backgrounds.

Our current cross-channel campaign for World Cup has proved to be a telling case study for message curation versus message moderation. For text messages and direct-from-web messages, LocaModa relies on a queue view for moderation, in which messages are immediately rated and approved/rejected for display depending upon network, venue and brand guidelines. In the moderation model, messages are handled chronologically by time sent.

However, when we’re looking at the millions of messages tagged #worldcup over the duration of the tournament (300,000 per game and up to 3,000 per second), we’re facing a message saturation level that begs the Moderation Queue to be weeded. We’re no longer in the position where having every message displayed is the best solution; instead, the ability to choose the most relevant and timely messages out of the tens of thousands per hour received becomes a huge boost to the value of the content stream. While on one level hashtags have made it easier to filter content quickly, overused or misused hashtags threaten the integrity of the practice.

That’s where LocaModa flips the switch to Message Curation…

In this model, a moderator can quickly sift messages for context and nuance that tags can miss. The goal is to fill the allotted place-based display time with as many quality, campaign-relevant messages as possible, while weeding out the messages that tagging alone couldn’t cull.

For an event with as much social media traffic as the World Cup, message curation proves a necessary step to whittling down the noise.

Now pass me my vuvuzela.

[For more insight on displaying social media content on place-based screens, you can download a full version of LocaModa's recent white paper, "Twitter on Place Based Screens: Why It’s Not So Simple," written by Senior Systems Architect Jacob Elder.]

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