This is what a beacon looks like...

There is a lot of industry chatter about beacons, but I realized this morning that many people may not know what a beacon looks like.  I myself didn't know until last fall when Odem built the world's first turnkey proximity marketing solution with inline planning, implementation, management, and analysis tools for paid, earned, owned, online, and offline marketing. An "agency in a box" per se, but anyway, back to beacons.

A few things about beacons...
There are three main beacon signals: iBeacon developed by Apple, AltBeacon which is community driven/open source, and Eddystone developed by Google.

There are a few types of beacons on the market. The ones pictured here are from Radius Networks and powered by USB.  Additional picture provided so you can see how small they are (one of these is plugged into my keyboard.)

Standalone versions can be battery powered or plugged in while others can operate with a limited / no power source over a long period of time.

So what do we do with them?
Beacons are being used more and more with many different applications: tracking inventory location, monitoring when employees enter or leave an office, distributing offers from companies to customers who have their application installed when that customer walks by a particular location and is in need of a particular product - to name a few.

At Odem we built a platform that enables organizations to use beacon technology, easily, in many different ways.

Recently we had a food and beverage client call and say "this company is trying to sell me on a $500 per month subscription for a television that displays my menu and local tweets about my business" to which we said "give us a day to come to you, we can help."  24-Hours later, and at a lower cost with greater value we delivered a Google Chromebit (basically a computer on a stick) with a beacon installed that allowed them to not only turn an existing flat screen into one that would display a menu and local tweets about their business but into an intelligent display board that customized the marketing materials based on who was in the area promoting what they were most likely to respond to, customized offers based on purchase history, and provided the ability to communicate directly with patrons through the screen (and that's just for starters!)

Other clients have utilized similar devices to improve employee engagement or speed up check-in processes for events.

Soon Odem will be rolling out facial recognition technology to complete the loop, allowing for analytics around actual engagement by being able to tell how long someone actually paid attention and what their sentiment or reaction was towards a particular piece of communication.  Pair that with our current abilities to track action and conversion, and the opportunities are endless.

If you have any questions on any of this, or anything else related to marketing innovation, I would be happy to chat!

Also check out Odem, which stands for On Demand Effective Marketing and makes taking advantage of all these marketing opportunities super simple.  www.odemglobal.com