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Shel Holtz
Communicating at the Intersection of Business and Technology
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Are you ready to communicate via the Internet of Things?

Are you ready to communicate via the Internet of Things?

Communications and the Internet of Things

You don’t hear many people in the PR/communications industry talking about the Internet of Things (IoT). Somebody told me in passing, “We’re busy communicating with people. The Interent of Things is devices connected to devices. That’s not our job.”

That’s a misguided point of view, one we need to correct quickly because IoT is becoming more and more integrated into the systems we use every day. Consider Google’s announcement at I/O last week that it is developing an operating system for the Internet of Things. It’s codenamed Brillo, and will targed ultra low-power devices—we’re talking light bulbs, door locks, and the like. These devices need to boot up, handle input and ouput, and communicate over a network. If Google’s building an operating system for the Internet of Things, they surely see it as a huge opportunity—and don’t forget, they’ve already acquired Nest, DropCam, and some other IoT companies.

An International Data Corporation forecast examines the growth of IoT in 11 industries – consumer, retail, healthcare, government, manufacturing, transportation, and others, and highlights worldwide spending across IoT use cases, like smart appliances, automated public transit, remote health monitoring, connected vehicles, air traffic monitoring, and so on. Overall, the IoT market in manufacturing operations will grow from 42.2 billion in 2013 to nearly 100 million in 2018, with connected vehicles representing the hottest US market.

Superficially, it’s easy to see why communicators don’t think IoT involves them. A typical example of how IoT works involves a vending machine sensing it is running low on an item automatically adding more of that product to a distributor’s order.

If you read the literature of IoT, though, in most machine-to-machine communication, one of the machines is a smartphone or some other device used by a human being. A sensor in a pipeline detects corrosion and notifies maintenance personnel. Sensors on a patient inform medical staff when problems arise with blood pressure or blood sugar. Security can be notified if a door is opened unexpectedly. An electric utility can automatically contact a customer when power usage spikes, while a water company can dispatch a repair team when sensors detect a water main break.

IoT and marketing

Each of these examples involves converting the data collected by the sensor and converting it into some kind of human-understandable message. Grasping the potential, beverage giant Dieageo has innovated a smart bottle for its Johnny Walker Blue Label whiskey.

Every bottle features a printed sensor tag that, when scanned by a smartphone, connects to the phone’s Near-Field Communication chip. Now the bottle can detect if the seal has been broken or the bottle opened or closed and, based on that action, deliver personalized messages. Diageo plans to communicate with consumers after the bottle has been opened, but isn’t interested in selling anything at that point. A spokesman says the communication can contribute to building a relationship with the customer, offering suggestions (for example) on how to best enjoy the product.

Increasingly, we in the communications industry will not only be crafting IoT messages, but innovating opportunities to use IoT as another channel for customer interaction. These early days are the time to start thinking about how to employ IoT to add real value for the customer and avoid annoying messaging. Worse, unexpected missives from brands can wind up looking intrusive and creepy, leading to privacy-focused blowback.

IoT and crisis communications

I recently interviewed Freddy Mini, CEO of Netvibes, and his marketing chief, Kim Terca. Netvibes. (You can listen to the interview on the FIR Podcast Network.) Netvibes has been in the daashboard business for a decade, allowing users to create dashboards they can use to monitor topics from around the web. Earlier this week, Netvibes added a new dashboard: the Dashboard of Things. Users can program their dashboards “to automate interactions between data, apps, and devices.” For example, when your website goes down, the “potion” you created can email the IT team, send a text message to the website administrator, and automatically start a server reboot.

Terca—with her background in communication—sees uses for crisis management. For example, if negative mentions of your brand increase on Twitter, the entire PR team could get an email while a more immediate text message can go to the social media manager. If the CEO’s name is found in the same sentence as the word “arrested,” the entire board could be notified, the crisis team alerted, and the articles added to a service like Pocket, which allows you to read web content in one place when it’s convenient.

If you’re really gutsy, you could even prompt Twitter to deliver a preliminary message, like, “We’re aware of the situation regarding our CEO and will report what we know within an hour.”

Netvibes offers a laundry list of possible potions to kickstart your thinking.

IoT and digital signage

But when it comes to the communicator’s role in all of this, I was struck by an article in a digital signage publication called Sixteen-Nine that cites the IDC report I mentioned at the beginning of this post, suggesting digital signage is the biggest IoT growth driver. The IoT market will grow 20% this year, according to the data, and the biggest category of that growth is involves sending information to screens. Digital signage use in retail outlets will grow from $6 billion in 2013 to $27.5 billion in 2018. That’s better than 35% growth.

The author of the Sixteen-Nine report – Dave Hayes – notes that signage involves installing a lot of devices in the field, including players, smart screens, modems, routers, cameras, readers, and so forth. Signage, he writes, is also a rare industry where the benefits of all those connected devices can be readily apparent through dynamic data on screens.

I’m seeing digital signage everywhere. On Facebook a few weeks ago, I shared a short video I took from inside a liquor store. The door to the Budweiser cooler was a digital sign displaying motion graphics and advertising messages that grabbed your eye because it was, well, it was moving. The menu at my local Popeye’s chicken joint is also digital, which means corporate can add a menu item or change a price by adding it to the file, then push a button to have it appear on every menu in every store everywhere.

I wrote my Tech talk column for IABC’s Communication World magazine last month about digital signage and was contacted by a lot of communicators who use it for employee communication – these messages came from industries as diverse as manufacturing and financial services. this kind of strategy will be more and more important as customers begin to look to digital signage to provide value and answer questions better than they already do. Another Sixteen-Nine article recounts the experience of a father taking his son to tour universities he was considering.

Digital signage was everywhere. Five colleges. Five campus-wide digital signage networks. That’s the good news. The bad news? If there was a Digital Signage 101 class, unfortunately, every one of these schools would get a failing grade. On virtually every digital display, we saw fundamental mistakes. Too much information on the screen. Curious color combinations. Too much information on the screen. Inconsistent font styles. Too much information on the screen.  Teeny, tiny font sizes.  Did we mention too much information on the screen?

All of these universities have their own distinct brands and their unique brand stories. They all take great care to dial in their message on every platform … in print, online, in conventional signage. But there’s one platform they missed. The digital signage opportunity fell short. At all five schools, It felt like an afterthought. And for me, that was a head scratcher.

What’s coming is wide open to innovation. We will be able to interact with digital signage using our smartphones. The digital signage industry refers to all this at ‘out-of-home media,’ and it could shift to different kinds of screens; even wearables could come into play. Communicators need to be at the forefront of this shift rather than waiting for marching orders from others. Get up to speed on the Internet of Things and digital signage, or get ready to be caught sleeping as it ramps up faster than I’m willing to bet most communicators expect.

Illustration courtesy of wilgengebroed

Comments
  • 1.This is very interesting. I'd hate to see a future with "The Machine" watching our every move. I could really relate the Person of Interest series with what's currently happening in the digital world.

    Tony | June 2015

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