Ideas & Opportunities

It’s one thing to use social media for your business, and another to create a business around it.  Canada-based Mark Hemphill is one of those who have early on tapped the potential of social media to push targeted messages to the buying public.

As the chief product officer of ScreenScape Networks since 2007, Hemphill found himself developing next-generation content management systems that feed information to location-aware screens (read: digital on-location displays).  His experience in the software industry led him to experiment on “how industries could be streamlined using Internet techniques.”

Digital displays, commonly found in stores and in high-density areas like transportation terminals and shopping centers), can be easily dismissed as just another venue for advertising. But Hemphill and his team made the system more sophisticated in two ways: by linking the displays in a vast network accessible to all of ScreenScape’s partners; and by integrating foursquare and other social media sites in the content mix shown to customers.

With these improvements, the Canadian company boasts of being the first of its kind to apply the principles of “internetworking,” social media and mobile computing to place-based media.
Its digital displays, instead of acting as stand-alone screens with static content, stream real-time check-ins in foursquare or tweets on Twitter. Storeowners may also show their content previously uploaded in Youtube or Flickr through ScreenScape. Managers of businesses with ScreenScape displays in their stores may also make use of content shared via social media by its distributors, manufacturers and service providers and other business partners.

ScreenScape, part of Mashable.com’s Spark of Genius list in 2009, is now serving over 1,300 clients in North America and Asia, each of them demonstrating how effective internetworking could be in practically any place where you find people gathering: bars, clinics, theaters, recreation centers, etc.

The future of location-based shopping apps and platforms like ScreenScape is promising—PQ Media, a leading provider of alternative media econometrics, predicts that global ad spending on digital out-of-home advertising will grow from $7.5 billion in 2010 to $17.3 billion in 2016. On the other hand, research agency Ovum forecasts that in the Philippines, smartphones’ penetration rate will grow to 98 percent by 2015.

“As we become increasingly more mobile, the methods in which we consume media have also become more flexible,” says Hemphill. “Advertisers are finding that place-based marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to reach consumers and it complements traditional and emerging communications.”

• Twitter your way to marketing success
• Freelancers united
• Free entrepreneurship classes for May
• Startup event offers opportunities to Visayas-based entrepreneurs
• 7 most common challenges of Pinoy biz

• Hot home-based business ideas
• 10 Most Inspiring Entrepreneurial Stories of 2010
• Making money while staying at home
• 10 businesses you can start today
• 10 business ideas for Christmas