Interactive screens, mobile technology and Shakespeare are unlikely bedfellows.

‘Tis true, but Scholastic, the global education and media company, focused on helping children around the world to read and learn, is using LocaModa’s Wiffiti to make learning Shakespeare more fun.

In their Lesson Plan 5: Summarizing by Text-Messaging Shakespeare, they set out how teachers can safely use mobile technology and interactive screens to engage students.

I’ve taken the following excerpt from their website (the link above is well visiting - they do an excellent job of clearly explaining how to set up an interactive screen experience.):

DIRECTIONS
1. The teacher goes over mobile safety and appropriate use before beginning this lesson.
2. Before students begin reading Romeo and Juliet, the teacher reads the opening prologue. The teacher may also want students to be looking at the words as it is being read by projecting them on an overhead.
3. The teacher asks students to think about the prologue, and to summarize it in 140 characters by using their cell phones to send a text message to the Wiffiti screen that the teacher previously set up.
4. The teacher projects the Wiffiti screen along with the information on how to text to the screen (this automatically shows up on each Wiffiti screen).
5. The students begin to send their summaries to the Wiffiti screen via their cell phones.
6. Once the summaries are all up on the screen, the teacher reads through them and asks the students to vote on which one they think best summarized the prologue.
7. The teacher then selects a piece of dialogue or a scene from Romeo and Juliet, reads it, and has the students summarize the same way as above.

I find this so inspiring - not only in terms of the innovation in education (I wish I had such interesting classes when I was force-fed the Bard) but also because every day it is more and more obvious that media professionals HAVE to embrace technologies that enable dialogues with their audiences.

DOOH pros, where art thou?

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So few Location-Based Marketing platforms have been built for real-world applications.

As location-based applications from Foursquare, Facebook, Google and others have gained attention, most locations have been somewhat frustrated by how much effort is needed to embrace these platforms.

Limited functionality and/or complexity has thus far led to results that have not lived up to the red hot hype. For example, it is really difficult to create messages and/or deals for multiple locations without having to go into each location’s account - which can be too time consuming for larger retail groups. And in a business where 15 minutes spent on a website is 15 minutes not spent stocking shelves or hiring a waiter, simplicity and RoI count for more than “cool.”

So it’s good news that this week saw both Foursquare and Facebook update their interfaces for merchants.

Foursquare has been on a roll - raising $50 million, partnering with AMEX for deals, and this week, opening up their API for locations to be able to create their own deals via any platform (LocaModa for example - shameless plug). So now venues can use one interface (LocaModa for example - another shameless plug) - to create/edit/monitor their offers. More info via Foursquare here.

Facebook updated Facebook Pages with a Location feature and introduced a Deals API. The new Facebook Locations tab displays the “parent/child” relationship of claimed Facebook Places locations in one place. This means that large groups of stores (Parents) can change all their pages in one interface while still enabling a single store (child) to control their own messaging. More info via Facebook here.

This is all welcome news BUT it’s still likely that for the foreseeable future, brands and location owners won’t quite know what to put on their location pages or Facebook walls. The experience greeting many users may therefore still be rather underwhelming at best. A blank wall at worst.

(Drum roll) THAT’S AN OPPORTUNITY FOR DOOH.

We know how much time and effort has been spent on creating local content and information for screens in the locations - menus in cafes, announcements in health-clubs, deals in stores etc. This content can now more easily flow back to Foursquare and Facebook - as well as enabling any content created on those platforms finding its way to the location signage.

From a DOOH perspective, I like to say that screens need to have a range of miles, not feet. With a screen connected to Facebook or Foursquare (or Twitter et al), a screen can reach many more people and be more contextually interesting to the local audience, an on-line audience and advertisers. And connected DOOH screens are ever more measurable via the interactions of these audiences.

Thinking about a “Build or Buy” decision for a DOOH-ready social-media platform? It should more obvious than ever that this is a full time business with API changes from social media companies happening almost in real time - and in order to monetize the technology, the solution not only needs to be robust, extensible and scalable, but also needs to be network agnostic to attract brands who need to be wherever their target audience is.

As locations join the social graph, their technologies - not least the screens hanging on their walls - simply have to become more socially connected.

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A client just sent us their creative for a call to action on a forthcoming LocaModa campaign. Without giving away any names or clues, their call to action was something like “Text AYT9Q31628ZB for a chance to win…” To make matters worse - this CTA is to be displayed for 8 seconds.

Coincidently, at the same time as people here were pulling their hair out and trying to jump off ledges, I was reading this line in a blog post “Anybody who has looked at their customer acquisition funnel knows how even minor usability problems can drive away vast swaths of people.”

Sometimes I want to shoot myself in the head. It usually happens around the time a client is shooting themselves in the foot.

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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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In 15 Seconds Or More Part 1, I covered the three different types of place-based social media. In Part 2, I covered the seven steps in the user engagement path. In this final excerpt of the white paper of the same name (I’ll have to get around to finishing it now!), I’ll cover how place-based social media maps to different digital out-of-home channels.

Not all place-based social media is applicable to all channels. Some channels only have short dwell times or content loops (e.g. gas pumps) while others have longer dwell times and content loops (e.g. bars and events).

A guide to the type of place-based social media best suited to specific digital out of home channels can be seen in Fig 1 below.

Fig.1. Mapping Place-Based Social Media to Channels (Click to enlarge).

For short dwell times, or content slots of a maximum of 15 seconds, I’d recommend using passive place-based social media (e.g. displaying localized Twitter messages about a city, sports/team or news.) Zoom Media and Marketing Sport’s Bites and RMG Networks’ NYTimesToday.com are examples of passive applications built by LocaModa designed to grab attention and inform and/or entertain. True to their passive nature, these applications do not have call to action so do not support any DOOH user interactions.

For longer dwell times and content slots of 15-30 seconds, DOOH networks can use active place-based social media that support user participation features, subject to the capabilities of the DOOH network. As previously described, active place-based social media can be influenced by the DOOH audience but not in real time – either due to limitations of infrastructure or time required by brands/venues to ensure content is adequately filtered, moderated and/or curated. Example applications include trending Twitter topics or changes in existing accounts such as celebrities, to show which celebrities are more or less popular. Such applications can be used in supermarket check-out lines to entertain shoppers as described in this post about LocaModa and PRN.)

For long dwell times and content slots over 30 seconds, DOOH networks can use interactive place-based social media. Interactive applications include real-time Twitter, text/photo-to-screen, real-time polls, and check-ins (e.g. displaying check-in info and tips for services such as Foursquare, Facebook Places or Gowalla). Well designed and inexpensive moderation/curation tools make interactive applications easy to deploy these days.

There are plenty of application examples available via the LocaModa App Store and there will be more examples and information in the white paper which I’m aiming to finish before the end of this month.

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