Digital Signage Solutions

In 2007, the top baby boy names were Jacob, Michael and Ethan, and Emily, Isabella and Emma for the baby girls. Why is this important? It's not, but sometimes I think that people spend more time coming up with a name for the digital signage network than they do their own children.

Sure, it's important to properly brand your network in context with your other internal communications vehicles so that your audience doesn't call it "those TVs" or "that thing."

When I was at Rolls-Royce, I inherited the name RRTV -- not overly clever but the point gets across. I was determined to change it when we installed the new MediaTile cellular digital signage but then realized it was a worthless effort. Employees were used to calling it RRTV and were going to still call it RRTV no matter what I did.

Think back to when you rebranded a newsletter or launched an intranet site. I'm sure you can remember the amount of time spent on simply coming up with a catchy name. How important is the name now compared to the actual content contained?

So I guess I'm suggesting that it's definitely worth naming your digital signage solution so that people know how to refer to it, but please don't pull together a focus group to brainstorm "clever" names. If you're taking it that far, ask them the important stuff:

• What information would like to see on the digital signs?
• How often should it be updated?
• Who owns the information/content?
• How do we keep IT's collective hands out of the communications cookie jar?

It's okay to think of your digital signage as your baby (in fact we'd appreciate it), but please don't spend as much time naming it as you did your first born. In the classic 80's movie WarGames, the computer's name was Joshua. I don't see why you couldn't name your network Jacob or Isabella. Clearly people like those names. It might be kind of creepy but your employees likely wouldn't forget it.

"Would you like to play a game?"