It’s been about a year since subscribed to Google Alerts for “digital signage.” It’s a great feature I recommend. My reason for posting is just that of a simple observation regarding the alerts I’ve received following my subscription. My observation of the Google alerts in combination with my current sales experience has led me to this conclusion that just about every Peter, Paul, and Mary will agree with: everybody and their mom wants some piece of the growing digital signage pie.

First, let’s go over my email box and the blog alerts. It’s been getting a bit crazy, even a bit annoying. Yes, I’m an information junkie, especially when it comes to the digital signage industry. And I do appreciate the frequent updates regarding what is being written about in the industry. Having made that clear, it’s starting to get out of control. The frequency of the alert updates can almost be tracked by the minute now, “oh, look there’s another one…” And so on, and so forth.

The second interesting note is the frequency at which we see the emergence of companies vying into a growing industry. As I go about my day as “salesman” for digital signage software and hardware services, I’ve noticed a growing trend. People are looking for some sort of digital signage white label available for resell and rebrand. This is an observation I see for about 30% of our English speaking leads. In most instances, the company is a local or regional AV integrator or advertising/marketing firm seeking to add another arrow in their quiver of weapons to toss out at customers. Or, perhaps the draw is even greater now that the economy has slumped. Whatever the reason, it’s been very intriguing to watch things play out.

It may be just the beginning. There’s going to continue to be a barrage of PR, News, and Blogs shoving their content in our faces until we’ll simply have to say, “I’ve had enough.” In my humble opinion, however, there is nothing worse than a crappy blog. On the flip side, there is nothing better than a blog with useful content. But even content is sometimes not good enough to stay out of the red. But at least you’ve got something interesting for people to read.

My advice: Stick to an RSS reader to get your information. That way you can sparse out the stuff you think would be interesting to read from the stuff that is just content for content’s sake.