Interview: Digital Signage Advice and Considerations from David Wible

So it all comes down to the type of information you want to give to that employee. If there are decisions for that employee or target audience to make, touchscreens absolutely make sense. If it’s more of just presenting information and not requiring a target audience to do anything more than look, touchscreens are probably a bit of an overkill.

TD: When a company is utilizing digital signage, what should they be looking for regarding content creation or management software? Should they expect to hire someone to cover that, to train someone, or to pay an outside party to create content for them?

DW: When I think about content, especially in corporate communications, the one thing a lot of our clients are surprised about is that nine times out of ten, the employee will be numb to the information the company is going to deliver. To get the attention of the employee, you need to integrate content outside the organization like news, weather and sports scores with corporate content. The good news about the social content is that it is created constantly and simply needs to be managed and filtered. Any corporate worthy communication platform needs to be able to access that information.

In regards to hiring people to actually manage your digital signage content – make it easy for them to find the content both inside and outside the company. For our customers, I’m always looking for data integrations to be able to connect into departments that have rich information. These integrations once developed into a digital media platform can drastically reduce the amount of labor you will need to manage your content. There will always be a need by the company in regards to making sure the brand is well represented – the colors are well represented, the logo isn’t presented in such a way that it has a negative impact on the brand. But once those things are set, it should be mandatory that a software platform give you the ability to integrate with existing data, connect with socially relevant content outside the company walls, and give a secure way to aggregate that information and present it on the screen in a ratio that will keep the audience engaged, and at the same time get the corporate initiatives communicated effectively.

TD: What about companies that have multiple floors or multiple screens that they are managing?

DW: We’re so used to hearing about the cloud, and a central place where all that content is managed as well as a central place for understanding where all those players are located – whether it’s on a building, in a campus, nationally or internationally employed – a corporate-worthy system should be able to manage the topology of all of the digital screens, as well as be able to segment content to securely deploy as needed.

TD: How can people learn more about some of these topics?

DW: We have a webinar on November 11th at 2:00 ET. It will talk about our corporate communications suite. So everything from lobbies or directories to our conference room solutions – all of the digital signage solutions that corporations can take advantage of.