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iBeacons for internal communications

Published Sep 30, 2014 – By Martin MacConnol, CEO

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Thanks to the power of digital invention, every day our world changes. As an agency man that makes me happy – change forces us to keep thinking and rethinking the possibilities. That in turn excites our clients.

Take iBeacons for example. Why should we be interested in them in the first place? After all, our clients tend to use us to reach targeted business audiences – from customers to colleagues – not the consumers who walk through the doors of a Tesco or a Debenhams.

In case you haven’t heard of them, iBeacons are likely to become the next big thing in personalised consumer engagement. At a unit cost of around £20, a beacon in a store, linked to a native app, allows a brand to engage one-to-one with a consumer who walks through the door.

Of course, handled wrongly iBeacons have all the potential to take us into a new part of Creepy Valley (imagine getting a message saying: “Hello Doug, I saw you were looking at underwear last night online, perhaps you’d like to visit aisle three”).

But, if done well they do, of course, offer a whole new world of personal engagement, sweeping away the untargeted marketing chaff and making communications more bespoke. And that is the sweetspot for all organisations and their audiences in this time-poor media-saturated world.

As I sat listening to a set of presentations on iBeacons last week my mind started whirring… it’s clear that this technology, created for one audience type (here the retail consumer audience) has applications for others, such as employees.

For instance, how brilliant would it be for one of our client companies that struggles to engage their disparate workforces – often because they don’t sit at computers – to use the iBeacon system to get their stories out? After all, everyone these days has a smartphone.

You read it here first: when the (next) revolution comes in internal communications it will have an iBeacon at its heart.

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