I tweeted today about a Wiffiti screen being used to collect prayers. You can see the screen here.

Prayers are being texted (send @wif40815 to 87884), tweeted (send a tweet using the hashtag #real faith) or typed online at Wiffiti.com (or any site that chooses to embed the screen). Of course the same Wiffiti screen can also be displayed in churches and communities to foster greater connectivity.

We allow “Teachers and Preachers” to have a free version of Wiffiti, and it’s been interesting to note that over 40,000 screens have been created.

When we first created Wiffiti, we thought of it like a digital Wailing Wall so it’s good to see that vision being embraced. What can we learn from this? Across the board, traditional walls (pun intended) are coming down. Teachers and preachers have lost the battle to get their audiences to turn their phones off. They really want to connect, so they have to use the tools their students and configurations are using.

I’m just amazed that social and mobile technology is being embraced in schools and churches and is still feared by many brands and agencies. Maybe those wayward media folks need a little more faith (another pun intended) in technology?

I typically do a weekly scan of new deployments in digital signage across LocaModa’s most relevant channels - quick serve restaurants, bars, entertainment venues, public spaces. Most are fairly standard POS solutions, digital menu boards, and streaming news content. Since we’re focused on elevating such installments to include interactivity (and ultimately branch them into a cross-channel effort), I often have a hard time evaluating the signage at face value and not immediately jumping to next steps.

A headline on the Digital Signage Expo site this morning caught my eye not because of a unique use of digital signage, but for the cool factor of the venue itself: The Cereal Bowl Restaurants Roll Out Digital Signage.

A QSR devoted entirely to customized cereal creations? So smart.

Add in fro-yo options to hop aboard the Pinkberry craze? All the smarter.

Their new digital signage installation makes me salivate thinking about the options for interactivity on those screens! To start, patrons could send in texts with their favorite cereal “recipes” and email in mobile photos of their creations once they’ve been built. How about incorporating a social poll where users submit their carby masterpieces and other patrons vote and comment? Add in customized Cereal Bowl Twitter and Flickr hashtags… and now we’re getting somewhere.

For such a fun venue, I’d love to see the ante upped with their DS solution…

Txt @cereal + your message to 87884, or email your photos to [email protected]!

My previous two posts (I, II) have attempted to lend structure to the inherently elusive measurement model for cross-channel campaigns. As much as I underscore on the ‘qualify over quantify’ model, people love numbers. Particularly clients.

Hey, go figure.

Luckily, many of our applications love the numerical spotlight. Take Jumbli, for example. For our cross-channel campaign with AT&T, the average interaction time for the word game was 76.77 minutes for web players and 4.15 minutes for mobile players. We have players that have accumulated more than 5 million points- that requires literally months of play.

However, as I discussed in yesterday’s post, the Vans Be Here campaign follows an entirely different user reward model. For this campaign, we want the actual user interaction time to be fairly short (because the UI is clear and the submission process is efficient), and for the meat of the interaction (the ‘share’) to carry on long after the site has been closed (or after the user walks away from the billboard).

The metrics we can track numerically (total # of users, # of unique users, # of submissions) pale in importance to the number of minutes that users spend sharing their snapshot, replaying their Times Square webcam video, encouraging their friends to send in their photos.

And therein lies the rub.

Because we’ve outsourced the ‘reward’ to the user (in allowing them to use our platform in a very personal, natural way), we’ve made the richest metrics harder to quantify. Does this make the campaign less valuable than a Jumbli campaign that has a much more quantifiable user experience? Of course not.

But it does require an understanding within the industry that a shift is happening- one that humiliates your calculator under a pile of Facebook status updates.

As we prepare for NYE, the anticipated busiest day of our cross-channel campaign with Vans, we’re faced with the question of measurement. Multi-multi-measurement.
To put it mildly.

Let’s back up. Single-modal campaign stats can be broken down into fairly standard tables with the traditional cast of characters: users, pageviews, impressions…

Even digital or otherwise ‘dynamic’ campaigns have become digestible enough over the past few years; interactions like clicks and txts have accumulated the necessary precedence to be adopted into the common marketing vernacular and hold meaning at face value. In most cases, digital numbers can be chopped finely enough to be contained within a traditional analytic structure (with possibly a few relational clauses and an asterisk or two).

But what about a campaign that asks users to click, txt, view, visit, watch, write, submit, photograph, playback, share, and embed? And do so in their own particular way, using whatever combo of devices they want, globally, 24/7?

Welcome to our world.

Cross-channel campaigns like Vans BeHere require an entirely new measurement rubric- one that involves far more than Excel tables and line graphs. User engagement becomes a complex equation involving all of the verbs above, some multiplied, some summed. But here’s the kicker: the three-click rule still applies, and it’s no longer confined to just the web or the mobile phone. When ‘spreadability’ reigns, you just better make sure that you let the user decide which three clicks (or txts, or playbacks, or embeds) he wants to make.

From a brand perspective, the ultimate success of a campaign like this isn’t raw numbers; that’s far too compartmentalized and myopic to mean much of anything. The ‘win’ here is verifying that the audience has been given the tools to craft their own user experience in an instinctual way, and can then pass these tools to friends (so that they can then use them in their own way…) Boiled down, it’s a matter of containing viral spread to the point that it captures and engages a critical mass of target users without losing effect.

Toss that in your pie chart.

While the rest of the LocaModa team deals with the ice and cold of the Northeast, our CEO Stephen Randall is living it up networking and speaking out in LA at the Interactive Local Media Conference, held by BIA/Kelsey at the Hyatt Century Plaza Hotel.

Stephen’s panel is entitled “Digital Out-of-Home: Expanding the Interactive Experience for the Consumer,” and kicks off at 10:45 on Friday morning (12/11).

The agenda reads:
Three screens were never enough. The next big wave is the fourth screen: Digital Out-of-Home. A breakaway media category, BIA/Kelsey projects digital out-of-home spending will soar to $3.7 billion by 2013 by powering audience engagement through video screens at gas stations, on city buses and roadside billboards, and in-store. But what’s the most effective format? What are the best categories? Who are the most likely advertisers? During this panel led by BIA/Kelsey Chief Strategy Officer Rick Ducey, you will learn about the drivers and revenue pivot points. This session will also include a special digital out-of-home demo that will highlight the effectiveness of this emerging medium. Are you ready to see local media in a powerfully different way?

If you’re not so lucky to be living it up networking in LA tomorrow, you can participate via mobile or web by texting @ILM09 + your message to 87884 or submitting via web. You can also tweet using the hashtag #ILM09 and your messages will be dynamically pulled into the stream.