Because LocaModa CEO Stephen Randall just isn’t busy enough, he recently authored two new white papers that speak expressly to the DOOH market, but simultaneously address a broader scope of place-based and interactive media issues as well.

These two white papers are available for free full download below.

Increasing the Value of a Digital Out of Home Network Via Metcalfe’s Law

Metcalfe’s law states that the value of a network is the square of its connected users (n2). DOOH networks, being typically single hub and spoke designs, fail to leverage the potential network effect of Metcalfe’s law and are consequently failing to maximize their value to locations, advertisers or end users.

The Digital Out of Home Tipping Point

Lessons can be learned from the web and the mobile industry to help Digital Out of Home reach its “tipping point.” Those lessons reinforce that media needs to be more measurable and more engaging, and networks need to offer less friction to brands and agencies wishing to reach their audiences across multiple channels.

The full collection of LocaModa White Papers is available on our site.

One week in Vegas, two Gold DSE awards, a huuuuuge launch on Miracle Mile with our Foursquare app, an integration announcement with UCView, a partnership announced with Eventful, and two successful panels by Stephen Randall…

And today we hit TechCrunch!

The pix can’t begin to tell the story, but Twitter can…

Pics all courtesy of HighHolburn.

I’m turning the blog over today to LocaModa’s CEO Stephen Randall for a special guest post on our integration with one of our favorite new services, Foursquare.

Recently, The Boston Globe reported on the latest location-based service to turn the heads of media mavens:

“Foursquare, the mobile phone software and accompanying website turn your daily peregrinations into a competition: every time you venture somewhere (your neighborhood Dunkin’ Donuts, or the Boston Garden), you use the Foursquare app or mobile Web site to “check in,” getting credit for being there. The person who has checked in the most at a particular location becomes the mayor — at least until someone else shows up more often and steals the title.” (“The 21st century’s version of ‘Killroy was here,’” The Boston Globe, Scott Kirsner, 28. January 2010).

Unless disabled by the user, Foursquare check-ins automatically send a message to the user’s “social graph” (the number of friends people have on social networks), and if the user so chooses, updates his Twitter feed as well. The average number of friends, followers or fans on social network sites such as Twitter is 126 (source: The Guardian, 29. June 2009). Facebook’s social graph is 130 (source: Facebook).

The user experience is fun and engaging, and it’s obvious why some enterprising venues have started to reward customers who use these apps to announce their presence to their friends. The merits of displaying location-based services for locations should be apparent – they are a user-generated marketing tool for the venue. It is therefore ironic that location-based services are not designed for place-based screens at all, but for web and mobile screens.

The Globe article went on to mention a local battle for mayorship of Toscanini’s, a well known café not far from MIT in Cambridge, MA. LocaModa’s HQ is five minutes away from Toscanini’s (Tosci’s to locals). As long-time fans of Tosci’s and friends of its larger-than-life owner, Gus, we use the café as a lab to test new place-based social media applications. In November ’09, we started testing Foursquare on Tosci’s LCD screen, the first time Foursquare was used as a real time interactive DOOH application.

The LocaModa Foursquare app (shown above) dynamically displays a picture of the mayor, the number of check-ins and user tips about the café. The screen also displays real time Twitter messages tagged “Toscanini” and “Tosci.”

I have previously written about ensuring place-based screens have a range of miles not feet (i.e. that they connect venues across channels to brand websites and social network fan pages etc). Location-based services are an excellent example of cross channel engagement and are therefore likely to be a mainstay of many place-based networks.

You can also download a pdf version of this post.

A few weeks ago, I attended a talk at the Berkman Center that centered around the concept of online “platforms” and the politics of the loosely-defined layers tangled up in the term.

From a theoretical vantage point, the need for a firmer definition comes at a favorable intersection. The mainstream players cited in the talk (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr) have all undergone endless UI iterations and carry robust and vocal user bases, indicating that basic functionality is well understood across audiences; yet, from a partner integration standpoint, the services remain malleable enough that brands and networks can still help to define their access points and relational methodology.

The critical point here is that this juncture isn’t only ripe in the academic sphere. Clearly the industry can (and should) benefit as well, and it should be noted that this ‘industry’ encompasses not only digital signage networks, but an entire host of satellite segments (see diagram above).

It’s evident that it’s prime time for defining not only what a platform can and should be in a New Media sense, but also for proving its potential in the term’s most basic faculty: as an interactive stage for people, causes, and ideas.

A better defined platform becomes the industry’s foundation for new sets of fresh, ready to run, interactive, real-time apps that will help shape further integration across DOOH.

(And it should come as no surprise that we have more up our sleeve in this regard…)

Yesterday, I addressed the difficulty in pinning down metrics for place-based cross-channel campaigns like Vans Be Here.

We can all agree that we’re scrabbling on slippery ground when it comes to crunching numbers. So what do we do about it?

First, locate the reward.

For this campaign, the real payoff for the user is grabbing a snapshot of their photo (or text message) displayed on Viacom’s iconic Jumbotron in Times Square and sharing it with friends.

Now make this step as simple as possible for the user. (In this example, we send them an email with a direct link to their ‘moment,’ and we allow them to spread the photo with a single click.)

Direct Link:

Upon clicking the “Snapshot” button:

But, what is this interaction exactly?
How do we account for this?; rather, how do we ‘count’ this?

Well, the tricky thing is that this interaction starts with a unique user’s single click, but the real fruit falls when the snapshot is shared. For simplicity’s sake, let’s say the average # of connections for this one user is 126 (the current average # of followers for Twitter users, which seems fair in respect to The Dunbar Number).

So does this count as 1 click and 126 impressions?
Not quite.

What about the out-of-home component? How many eyeballs saw this photo in Times Square? How many people did it affect (passively, subconsciously)?; How many were actually stirred to effect (actively sending in their photo, too)?

Well, if we take into consideration that 1.6 million people pass through Times Square each day (and 500,000 gather there on NYE), then we’ve clearly thrown an exponent into the mix here (though actual computations here are flimsy at best). [src]

A campaign like this must be understood as tracking ‘interaction bundles’ rather than simply impressions or clicks (at the risk of muddying the already murky waters of digital out-of-home vocabulary). The only way to give meaning to numbers here is to qualify rather than quantify:

* Define your verbs (click, txt, view, visit, watch, write, submit, photograph, playback, share, embed)
* Assign worth (find the ‘fruit’)
* Construct goals around collecting as much of this fruit as possible (in this case, getting as many users as possible to share their image with their friends).

Not done yet.

Now calculate the out-of-home spreadability and brand identification piece that’s happening here on a much larger scale than any subset of active users could ever proliferate (no matter how much you subscribe to The Law of the Few).

We end up with a results overview that should remain focused on the brand awareness component, but should also give due credence to the rich ‘interaction bundles’ of the superuser (one who actually employs at least three of these verbs- e.g. visits the site, sees the billboard, sends in content, gets a snapshot, and shares among his social graph).

Have I made you nostalgic for the days of banner ads yet?