LocaModa has set up a new community customer service portal thanks to Get Satisfied!
Here you’ll find FAQs, help topics on Wiffiti and Jumbli, and a forum to get all of your pressing questions answered. Head on over to check it out and give us a quick piece of your mind…
Also, in case you haven’t already, come visit us on Facebook!
We’ve had a lot of interest lately from Wiffiti users who are looking for advanced features, more customization, and professional moderation. So, in addition to personal responses (always feel free to contact us directly), I wanted to address some of those issues here as well. Keep an eye on the blog for user questions as they come in.
Most of the LocaModa Feature posts on this blog capture the work we’re doing for major agencies and brands, with massive displays and custom cross-channel integration work. But don’t be put off if you’re a nonprofit or smaller network looking to integrate our services! We’re currently running a Self-Managed Apps Program which offers a menu of advanced features catered to smaller organizations like schools and churches.
We’re also always open to feedback from smaller organizations that have found success using Wiffiti. We’re always adding new features to our roadmap based on your ideas, so keep them coming. For example, after hearing that you’d like a “reveal” feature to showcase the Wiffiti background images at timed intervals, we got to work on integrating this into our custom feature set. We’re also plugging away at a bundle of new options for custom photo display, coming soon to the advanced features list!
Part III of Stephen Randall’s White Paper series on Digital Out of Home best practices has been released today via DailyDOOH.
This paper focuses on curing what we call the “Ghost Town Problem,” which refers to digital screens that receive little to no audience participation. Because every screen lives and dies by its context (both in terms of physical environment and audience composition), solving Ghost Town becomes a complex brew of leveraging content from similar locations and social feeds, providing a relevant and clear call-to-action, and catering content, visuals, and messaging to audience type.
The full text is available for free download.
A bit over three years ago I started a spreadsheet tracking all of the ‘social and mobile services’ floating around the marketplace, which I organized into (inevitably nebulous) subcategories: location-based, standard text-to-screen, web-only social utility, photo-specific, ad-serving, etc, etc…
Needless to say, this little project has grown well beyond the bounds of a simple Excel doc over the past few years, and compartmentalization has only become messier. Trend waves ebbed and flowed; Startups were funded, bought, merged, and killed; I watched a little app called Twitter hit puberty and adulthood in the span of a month, promptly explode, and ultimately ‘grow into its nose.’
Beneath the social soup that was steeping under the names of Socializr, Attendi, Eventful, Troovy, Vibely, Planypus, Qwikker, WeHangHere, Trusted Places, PlaceShout, MoBloco, Mobango, Meetro, MingleNow, BunchBall, DodgeBall, FatDoor (and enough others to make my scroll finger weary) emerged a few winners, a sack of losers, and a whole new set of best practices.
So, are we in Mobile/Social/Local Land 2.0 yet?
The way I see it: almost.
I’ve been playing around with FourSquare and (to a lesser extent) GraffitiGeo over the past few days, and it’s clear that those of us knee-deep in this stuff have learned a few things while mucking around in the aftermath of round one:
1. Incentives are critical (prizes, badges, role hierarchies, etc). Users need a reason to keep playing other than ‘it’s hip and new.’
See above- ‘new’ isn’t unique.
2. Give users explicit instructions on what to do, but let them figure out why they’d want to. Twitter’s ‘What are you doing?’ call to action is brilliant in its own coy little way, and while FourSquare’s “Check in/Add a Tip” still needs tweaking, it’s edging closer to that magic formula.
3. Multi-modal unification needs to be clean and easy. (The iPhone experience should be seamless with the web play, and so on…)
4. While social services will always be about ego, they also need to be about fun. Even the most self-absorbed sixteen year-old tires of navel-gazing after a while. Appeal to quirkiness, appeal to whimsy, appeal to the element of surprise. Even if your target audience is 40-something corporate execs, everyone likes to undo the top button. Help them.
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Seen any apps or services that appeal to the conditions above? Leave me a comment so we all can play.
(Pssst… that’s #5: Social services make a big fat ‘splat’ sound when you’re using them alone… which is why GraffitiGeo’s social mob/heatmap angle seems so promising.)
MediaPost’s Online Media Daily featured a piece this morning highlighting the fact that regular mobile phones (those “which do not have operating systems of offer the same range of functionality as smartphones”) are working to keep up with the likes of the iPhone and BlackBerry. The article notes that while “feature phones” are slowly losing ground to smartphones, they still hold a strong lead in market share – 72%.
So we’d like to use this opportunity as a reminder to those looking to add interactivity to their digital out of home campaign: no smartphones, no custom apps, no true OS? No problem. All you need to interact with the LocaModa platform is a text messaging plan (US only…for now).
I’ll admit that the majority of LocaModa employees have iPhones (with a BlackBerry or two in the mix). But that doesn’t mean we don’t build our platform with universal compatibility in mind. We even have a few feature phones sitting around the office for testing.
Sure, writing a custom app (like Jumbli for the iPhone) to integrate into your DOOH campaign will enhance some interactive experience, perhaps providing revenue opportunities and – of course – plenty of buzz. But when it comes down to it, the good ol’ text or photo message is all you need to extend your interactive media to audiences beyond the web.
Above, LocaModa’s test cell phones. Shown with original iMac puck mouse to illustrate age of technology.
