Taking advantage of this generation’s mad text messaging, LocaModa has launched technology that takes all that social blather and slaps it up on a screen for all to see. Of course, LocaMode describes it more verbosely calling it the world’s first in-location blogging platform for what it calls “The Web Outside” which enables in-location messaging, social networking and blogging along with entertainment applications for use in out of home networks cafes, bars, clubs and other public places. This technology, StreetMessenger, coupled with something called Wifiti (cute) which LocaModa lovingly refers to as “wireless graffiti,” takes all this communal socialization and displays in on a large flat panel display at the location and also onto the web for others to vicariously experience whatever’s going on at the location.
In a sense, it’s taken smaller, formerly physical conversational clumps and tranforming them into one big conversational clump for many to join. The American Legacy Foundation with its Truth campaign has partnered with LocaModa to create its own conversational network called ntwrk truth which will be taken to locations where teens congregate. On Valentine’s Day, several tests of the technology will roll out in New York and Boston at Batcave, a New York teen nightclub, Good Time Emporium, a game parlor outside Boston and Toscanni’s Ice Cream, a Cambridge, MA ice cream spot.
As long as marketers don’t get too preachy and overbearing, this event/locatikon-based sort of advertising channel could hold some promise. But, like marketers are just beginning to discover about blogging, it has to be social. It has to be conversational. It cannot be a one way message or else people will just ignore it all and go back to standard practices like SMSing each other and – gasp – talking.
